The Effect of Differences in Subject Display Format on Sentence Production Difficulties in Essay Writing
Shin Mikami (AY 2022)
In recent years, it has been noted that the writing skills of university students have declined. Writing is essential for writing reports, papers, and other documents in student life. Writing has also become an important factor in university entrance examinations. Factors that have been pointed out as contributing to the decline in writing skills include (1) about half of young people are not good at writing long and logical sentences such as reports, papers, and essays, and (2) in recent years, opportunities for reading texts have decreased due to a decrease in reading time and an increase in time spent watching video clips on the Internet. Therefore, this study examined how differences in the presentation format (text or video) of an essay's content affect the perceived difficulty of producing sentences.
To achieve the purpose of this study, an experiment was conducted with 28 undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Tsukuba. The experiment was conducted on a PC using ZOOM. The subjects first answered a questionnaire that measured their characteristic difficulty in producing sentences, their habit of writing 800 words or more, their average daily reading time, their average daily video watching time, and whether they liked writing. They then ranked the six essay-style topics (social, scientific, international, sports, business, and cultural) that they felt most comfortable writing about, and selected the top two as their essay assignment. Students were asked to first view the essay topics in either text (with images) or video format. After viewing the material, students were asked to indicate how much they felt they understood the material. They then worked on the essay assignment corresponding to the topic for the first five minutes only. They then responded to an item-specific writing difficulty scale. Because this was a within-subjects experiment, participants were asked to work on two forms of essay material in different orders: written (with pictures) and video. Finally, participants were asked to indicate which of the essay formats they found easier to write and to write freely about their reflections on the experiment. The written (with pictures) essay topic was a PDF and the video essay topic was a video on Youtube.
The results of the experiment showed no significant differences in task-specific text production difficulties for each display format, the four factors of the Task-specific Text Production Difficulties Scale ("Overall Structure," "Choice of Expression," "Reader Awareness," and "Ideas"), or the number of words written. However, there was a significant trend toward less difficulty with video subjects on the Idea factor of the Text Production Difficulty Scale. The results also suggest that the written subject may be less difficult on the task of confirming the consistency of written expression. These results suggest that the use of multiple media may be effective in reducing writers' difficulty in producing complex texts.
It is possible that the setting of the comprehension difficulty level of the subject matter in this study was not appropriate. Therefore, as a future direction, we believe that it may be possible to increase the difficulty level of the subject matter and clarify the effects of different task-specific presentation formats of tasks and subject matter on task-specific text production difficulties, not only in essay writing but also in text production.
(Translated by DeepL)