TAI #11 Formation of Hypotheses

Explain how literature helped the formation of hypotheses 

After my literature search, my feelings about teaching writing to English learners were verified - that teaching writing to English language learners is difficult and will take time. However, I found the following evidence-based ideas very helpful for the effectiveness of teaching writing to English Language learners. They helped me in the formation of hypotheses for my inquiry.

• The importance of understanding the difficulties the learners face from their perspectives when teaching them writing.  

• To meet the ELL students' writing needs, the composition teaching activities should include not only cognitive/linguistic aspects of writing, but also psychological/emotional and socio/cultural aspects of writing. 

• One of the main goals of teaching writing to ESL students is to have a focused target on skills required and desired of the students and to produce a well-structured piece of writing which is recognized and accepted in their academic department.    

• The use of genre-based instructions framework may support ELL students' development of advanced literacy practices, therefore explicit instruction and teaching of certain writing genres required of them can be beneficial.

• The use of corrective feedback for ELL students does have a positive impact on improving writing skills and helps to motivate students as well.

• The positive and favourable effects of scaffolding of the teaching and learning of writing among weak ESL learners.

• The teaching of argumentative essay to English Language learners based on Toulmin Model for Arqument - Data, Claim, Wallant and other approaches to argument pedagogy.

Based on these findings from literature search, I feel that my hypotheses will be multi-faceted. This will be appropriate and necessary for teaching writing as a complex multifaceted skill. The following table shows hypotheses for my inquiry.

My Hypotheses
1)	If I know my learners’ difficulties in writing from their own perspectives and design my instruction to address them as needs, then they will learn more about writing and increase their proficiency.
2)	If I know my learners’ cognitive/linguistic, psychological/emotional, or social/cultural difficulties in writing and address them in my teaching, then they will learn more about writing and increase their proficiency.
3)	If I target my teaching of writing on particular genre-types required and desired by the academic department at school and use explicit genre-based pedagogy in instruction, then my learners will acquire the related writing skills in those genres and increase their writing proficiency.
4)	If I use an explicit scaffolding approach in teaching writing to my learners, then they will have a chance to better understand and acquire specific skills of writing proficiency.
5)	If I use the Toulmin Model as base for teaching the purpose and structure of argumentative essay, then learners will be able to increase their proficiency in this writing genre.
6)	If I use corrective feedback to help learners identify how to improve their writing, then learners will know how to improve and increase their writing proficiency.