Critical Thinking Requirements and Lexicogrammatical Resources for Chinese Students Taking GRE Writing Tests: A Computer-assisted Action Research Project

Abstract

This Ph.D. thesis investigates the difficulties that Chinese students face when they prepare for Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) writing tests for US graduate school application and explores practical pedagogical solutions to help the students perform better in such tests. Through analyzing the reflective accounts of the test takers in an online forum (GTER.org), Chapter two identifies a set of difficulties faced by Chinese students taking GRE writing tests using identity as a theoretical lens. In Chapters three and four, the thesis presents an analysis of the issue and argument tasks of GRE writing tests, predisclosed by the Educational Testing Services (ETS) to describe the critical thinking requirements of the GRE test takers. Mohan’s Knowledge Framework and Toulmin’s model of arguments are used to analyze the critical thinking requirements of issue and argument tasks, respectively. In Chapters five, six, and seven, a computer program based on Stanford parser and WordNet is developed to explore the pedagogical solutions for expanding the productive vocabulary, developing syntactic maturity, and detecting grammatical errors for Chinese students preparing for GRE writing tests. The computer program, which demonstrates good potential for language teaching and discourse analysis, is named the Swartz text analyzer to honor Mr. Aaron Swartz, a martyr of the Free Culture Movement, and will be made freely available for the community of language teachers and applied linguists worldwide.

Date of Award	9 Jan 2017
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	John FLOWERDEW (Supervisor) & Becky KWAN (Supervisor)