Exemplification in student essay writing: a study of learner corpus of essay writing (LCEW)

Abstract

In academic writing, exemplification plays a crucial role in contextualizing complex ideational material through instances the readers can understand. In addition to illustrating ideas through concrete instances, the act of providing examples serves the purpose of helping the readers grasp the writer's intentions. However, strategically performing exemplification to elaborate the propositional material seems to be a challenge for many novice student writers. Although some studies have mentioned that students use significantly less frequently the exemplification resources in their writing, fewer studies have probed into EFL student writing to determine the problems they face in elaborating the ideas. Using the marker approach, which examines the discourse functions bottom-up from markers to moves, the learner corpus of essay writing (LCEW) was analyzed for three major forms of exemplification: representation, argumentation, and analogy. The results indicate that the examples are strictly limited to certain patterns like specifying concepts through a subcategory and illustrating the arguments through everyday experiences. Moreover, many examples deviate from the usual patterns of exemplification causing confusion. These findings have pedagogic implications for academic writing courses in the EFL context.