academic achievement language essay

39 Academic Achievement Examples

academic achievement examples and definition, explained below

An academic achievement is any recognized success you may have achieved in an educational context, that you might be able to present on a resume or scholarship application as evidence of your academic skills and unique academic strengths .

When presenting academic achievements, it’s often the case that prestige is the most important feature. Academic institutions are very hierarchical, where awards of degrees and scholarships tend to be tiered based upon how exclusive the achievement was, and how prestigious an institution it comes from.

Nevertheless, any achievement can be presented as positive and worthy of demonstrating your academic skillset, and might give you a leg-up when interviewing for a new job. For example, oftentimes, it’s best to present a relevant achievement over and above a prestigious one.

Below are some examples of academic achievements that you could present on a resume, scholarship application, etc.

Academic Achievement Examples

Examples for undergraduates and below, 1. your school grades.

For those of you just starting out, one thing you can do is reflect back on your grades as a student in high school (for the Brits among us, your A-Levels work, or for the Americans, your AP grades).

If you got great grades in certain subjects that are highly relevant to the position you’re applying for, highlight how those subjects are your strengths, and that objective tests have demonstrated this.

2. Winning a Scholarship

Winning a scholarship, which might be as simple as one that helped pay for your books during your undergraduate degree, or as prestigious as a Rhodes Scholarship or the Fulbright Scholarship, can demonstrate that you’ve been tapped as a promising student.

List your scholarships from most to least important, and include the conferring institution and cash value of the scholarship.

When interviewed about the scholarship, discuss how it demonstrates not only your promise as a scholar, but also your potential to make meaningful contributions to your field of study or society at large.

3. Receiving an Academic Award or Prize

An academic prize or award is something you receive as recognition for your achievements or successes as a student.

For example, you might receive an award or prize that demonstrates that you were toward the top of your class, or that you were tapped as a promising student.

Also consider awards and prizes that you received for entering contests, such as essay writing contests or even a science fair.

Winning an academic award can significantly boost your profile and open up further opportunities for advancement.

4. Leadership in an Academic Club or Society

Serving in a leadership role in an academic club or society demonstrates a student’s commitment to extracurricular learning and their ability to lead others.

This might include roles such as President of the Debate Team, Editor of a university journal, or Chair of a student-led seminar series.

These roles require skills in team management, problem-solving, and communication – all of which are highly valuable in a professional setting.

5. Participation in a Study Abroad Program

Taking part in a study abroad program shows a willingness to step out of one’s comfort zone and an ability to adapt to new environments.

This experience can also indicate language skills and a global perspective, both of which are valuable in many professional settings.

In addition, study abroad programs often involve navigating complex logistics, which can demonstrate problem-solving and organizational skills , which are all desirable for future employers.

6. Tutoring or Mentoring Experience

Serving as a tutor or mentor shows a mastery of a particular subject area, as well as a commitment to helping others succeed.

This experience can also demonstrate the ability to explain complex topics in understandable ways, patience, and a propensity for leadership.

These skills are valuable in many job settings, especially roles that require clear communication, team collaboration, and management abilities.

7. Completion of an Internship or Co-op Position

Completing an internship or co-op position during undergraduate studies is a significant achievement that can help bridge the gap between academic studies and the professional world.

These experiences provide students with an opportunity to apply their academic knowledge in a real-world setting and develop professional skills.

In addition, having this experience on a resume can make a candidate more appealing to potential employers, as it indicates that they have practical experience in their field of study.

8. Certifications

Even if you haven’t been to university, you may be able to recall a time you received a certification, such as when you participated in a continuing education certification for your workplace.

Make sure it’s a certification that has some academic merit, such as requiring you to sit an exam. Even better, if you can present one that comes with an officially recognized ‘seal’ such as a red seal for a trade, you could frame this as academic, especially if you had to go to a continuing education institution and learn theory to gain this certification.

Other Undergraduate Achievement Examples:

Class President / Class Representative
Competitions and Contests (e.g. science fair)
Extracurricular Activities (e.g. captain of a sports team)
Foreign language certifications
Leadership positions (e.g. class prefect, school captain)
Memberships (e.g. Acceptance as a member of a student group)
National / state awards
Nominations for awards
Student life participation and organization (e.g. organizing an event for a club)
Perfect attendance award
Sitting on the student council
Publications in the school newspaper
Volunteering in an academic context

Examples for Graduates

22. earning a degree.

Achieving a university degree, whether it’s an associate, bachelor’s, master’s, or doctorate, is a significant academic milestone.

This achievement is a testament to your intellectual acumen, as well as a wide range of soft skills such as determination, ability to self-regulate and manage your time, and your capacity to undertake rigorous study.

The degree subject can also reflect your area of expertise and align with the role you’re applying for, which is often the baseline for getting that interview you’re after.

When presenting your degree, mention the conferring institution and the skills you gained during your course of study. If you earned your degree with honors, be sure to mention that as well.

23. Earning a Continuing Education Certificate

Gaining a certificate through continuing education programs is another notable accomplishment. This might be a postgraduate certificate of diploma that’s not as extensive as a degree, but does show your commitment to continuing professional development.

A continuing education certificate shows your commitment to lifelong learning and your eagerness to expand your knowledge and skills.

These certificates, which can range from professional development courses to specialized skill training, signal your proactive attitude and ability to adapt to evolving industry trends.

24. Completion of a Significant Capstone Project

Many degree programs require a capstone project in the final year, which is an opportunity for students to apply and showcase the knowledge and skills they have acquired throughout their studies.

This might be an embedded honors project, or a research projected wherein you had to collect empirical evidence and present a thesis.

A successfully completed capstone project that addresses a real-world problem or contributes to a specific field of study can demonstrate that you’re able to engage in academic thinking and writing, think critically , and compose a thorough research project using a recognized qualitative or quantitative scientific methodology.

25. Graduation with Honors

Graduating with honors, such as summa cum laude, magna cum laude, or cum laude, is a significant academic achievement.

These Latin phrases, awarded based on grade point average or other academic criteria, are universally recognized symbols of academic excellence.

Graduating with honors shows a sustained commitment to hard work , intellectual growth, and academic success throughout one’s undergraduate or graduate studies.

26. Completion of a Research Assistant Project

Working as a research assistant and successfully completing a research project displays your ability to delve into complex topics, undertake detailed analysis, and contribute to the field of knowledge.

It also indicates your skills in collaboration, problem-solving, and critical thinking.

When listing this accomplishment, provide a brief overview of the project, the methodologies used, and any significant findings or results.

If your research led to a publication or presentation at a conference, make sure to include that as well.

(Note: If you want this achievement, reach out to as many professors as you can and see if they have upcoming RA positions available. Often, you’ll find there are a lot of professors wanting an RA but not actively putting out job postings for one.)

Examples for Postgraduates and Above

27. publication in a peer-reviewed journal.

Academic publishing is a significant achievement, particularly in fields where knowledge is primarily disseminated through scholarly journals.

When a student or scholar publishes original research or a review article in a reputable, peer-reviewed journal, it demonstrates their ability to conduct thorough research, critically analyze data, and contribute valuable knowledge to their field.

This achievement is highly regarded in academic and professional circles as it shows a high level of expertise and commitment to advancing the discipline.

28. Research Grant Award

Receiving a research grant, especially from a reputable institution or government body, is a significant accomplishment.

Such grants are usually awarded based on the quality and potential impact of the proposed research.

Winning a research grant indicates the recipient’s ability to design, propose, and possibly carry out valuable research in their field.

This accomplishment can provide the means to pursue further groundbreaking research, thereby bolstering the recipient’s academic standing.

29. Successful Defense of a Doctoral Thesis

Successfully defending a doctoral thesis or dissertation is an essential achievement in the journey of an academic.

This feat signifies the completion of a comprehensive piece of original research and contributes new knowledge to a field of study.

It requires years of dedication, intensive research, and critical thinking, culminating in a rigorous defense before a committee of experts in the field.

Upon successful defense, the candidate is usually awarded a doctoral degree, marking them as an authority in their area of research.

30. Acceptance into a Top-Tier Graduate Program

Gaining acceptance into a top-tier graduate program is a significant academic achievement.

Such programs are highly competitive and selective, often choosing candidates based on their academic record, research experience, and professional potential.

Being accepted into one of these programs is recognition of a student’s potential to succeed in advanced studies and make a substantial contribution to their field.

31. Presentation at a Major Conference

Being selected to present research findings at a significant academic conference is an important achievement.

These conferences gather top scholars in the field, and being chosen to present demonstrates that the research is seen as valuable and noteworthy by peers.

This accomplishment showcases the presenter’s ability to contribute meaningful discourse and their potential as a thought leader in their academic field.

32. Appointment to a University Faculty Position

Being appointed to a faculty position at a university is an academic achievement that signifies a high level of expertise and recognition in one’s field.

This position requires a record of successful research and teaching, and the competition is often intense.

Being chosen for a faculty role indicates that the university believes in the individual’s ability to contribute to the institution’s educational mission and to the advancement of knowledge in their discipline.

33. Development of a New Course or Curriculum

Designing and implementing a new course or curriculum at a university is a significant academic accomplishment.

This task requires a deep understanding of the subject matter, as well as the ability to design a structured, comprehensive, and engaging learning experience for students.

This achievement indicates a scholar’s dedication to education and their ability to contribute to improving academic programs in their field.

34. Taking a Role as Course Leader

After getting my first academic position, I told the head of my school that I wanted a course leader role as soon as one came available.

I soon was offered the position of course leader for the Masters of Education course at my university. I knew that this would look great on my resume.

A course leader role demonstrates that you can be a leader in academic contexts, overseeing a course to ensure it’s rigorous and up-to-date, and matches state or national certification requirements so that graduates can be recognized as having a degree required for getting a job in a specific field – in my situation, as teachers.

35. Guest Editing an Academic Journal Edition

Another academic achievement that I worked hard to receive in my first few years on the job was to become the guest editor for an edition of an academic journal.

I emailed academic journals and pitched my ideas, and I got one who came back to me – the Australasian Journal of Educational Technology . I edited the special issue on Cognitive Tools .

This achievement helped to establish me as someone who could successfully manage and oversee the blind peer review process, which subsequently got me a continuing job as a journal editor, which for me was the Journal of Learning Developers in Higher Education .

36. Citations to Your Publications

Citations to your publications can demonstrate that your research is having an impact in your academic community, and that it is contributing meaningfully to the field.

To find all the citations to your publications, go to google scholar and look up your name (or, create a google scholar account).

Here is mine:

Chris's citations from google scholar demonstrating that he has received 637 citations between 2018 and 2023

Based on this, I can demonstrate that my research has achieved some traction, and this is of course a demonstrable achievement!

Other examples for postgraduates and above:

Sitting as a Journal Editor
Sitting as a Peer Reviewer
Writing a Book Chapter

Even if you don’t feel you’ve had some academic achievements, it turns out once you’ve looked at the above example, you’ll likely have a few achievements under your belt. If you’re looking to advance yourself in an academic context, it’s best to stick your neck out and actively try to obtain further achievements, such as by applying for a research assistant position or working as a peer reviewer for a journal. This (often, unfortunately, underpaid work) can help you to get another step ahead of your competition when looking for a job that requires extensive academic skills.

Chris Drew (PhD)

Dr. Chris Drew is the founder of the Helpful Professor. He holds a PhD in education and has published over 20 articles in scholarly journals. He is the former editor of the Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education. [Image Descriptor: Photo of Chris]

Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 10 Cognitive Dissonance Examples
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ 10 Elaborative Rehearsal Examples
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Maintenance Rehearsal - Definition & Examples
Chris Drew (PhD) https://helpfulprofessor.com/author/chris-drew-phd/ Piaget vs Vygotsky: Similarities and Differences

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Academic Achievement

Introduction, general overviews.

National and International Reports
Measuring Academic Achievement
Intelligence
Personality
Students’ Familial Background
Other Variables Predicting Academic Achievement

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Forthcoming articles expand or collapse the "forthcoming articles" section.

Black Women in Academia
Girls' Education in the Developing World
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Academic Achievement by Ricarda Steinmayr , Anja Meißner , Anne F. Weidinger , Linda Wirthwein LAST REVIEWED: 30 July 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 30 July 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0108

Academic achievement represents performance outcomes that indicate the extent to which a person has accomplished specific goals that were the focus of activities in instructional environments, specifically in school, college, and university. School systems mostly define cognitive goals that either apply across multiple subject areas (e.g., critical thinking) or include the acquisition of knowledge and understanding in a specific intellectual domain (e.g., numeracy, literacy, science, history). Therefore, academic achievement should be considered to be a multifaceted construct that comprises different domains of learning. Because the field of academic achievement is very wide-ranging and covers a broad variety of educational outcomes, the definition of academic achievement depends on the indicators used to measure it. Among the many criteria that indicate academic achievement, there are very general indicators such as procedural and declarative knowledge acquired in an educational system, more curricular-based criteria such as grades or performance on an educational achievement test, and cumulative indicators of academic achievement such as educational degrees and certificates. All criteria have in common that they represent intellectual endeavors and thus, more or less, mirror the intellectual capacity of a person. In developed societies, academic achievement plays an important role in every person’s life. Academic achievement as measured by the GPA (grade point average) or by standardized assessments designed for selection purpose such as the SAT (Scholastic Assessment Test) determines whether a student will have the opportunity to continue his or her education (e.g., to attend a university). Therefore, academic achievement defines whether one can take part in higher education, and based on the educational degrees one attains, influences one’s vocational career after education. Besides the relevance for an individual, academic achievement is of utmost importance for the wealth of a nation and its prosperity. The strong association between a society’s level of academic achievement and positive socioeconomic development is one reason for conducting international studies on academic achievement, such as PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment), administered by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). The results of these studies provide information about different indicators of a nation’s academic achievement; such information is used to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of a nation’s educational system and to guide educational policy decisions. Given the individual and societal importance of academic achievement, it is not surprising that academic achievement is the research focus of many scientists; for example, in psychology or educational disciplines. This article focuses on the explanation, determination, enhancement, and assessment of academic achievement as investigated by educational psychologists.

The exploration of academic achievement has led to numerous empirical studies and fundamental progress such as the development of the first intelligence test by Binet and Simon. Introductory textbooks such as Woolfolk 2007 provide theoretical and empirical insight into the determinants of academic achievement and its assessment. However, as academic achievement is a broad topic, several textbooks have focused mainly on selected aspects of academic achievement, such as enhancing academic achievement or specific predictors of academic achievement. A thorough, short, and informative overview of academic achievement is provided in Spinath 2012 . Spinath 2012 emphasizes the importance of academic achievement with regard to different perspectives (such as for individuals and societies, as well as psychological and educational research). Walberg 1986 is an early synthesis of existing research on the educational effects of the time but it still influences current research such as investigations of predictors of academic achievement in some of the large-scale academic achievement assessment studies (e.g., Programme for International Student Assessment, PISA). Walberg 1986 highlights the relevance of research syntheses (such as reviews and meta-analyses) as an initial point for the improvement of educational processes. A current work, Hattie 2009 , provides an overview of the empirical findings on academic achievement by distinguishing between individual, home, and scholastic determinants of academic achievement according to theoretical assumptions. However, Spinath 2012 points out that it is more appropriate to speak of “predictors” instead of determinants of academic achievement because the mostly cross-sectional nature of the underlying research does not allow causal conclusions to be drawn. Large-scale scholastic achievement assessments such as PISA (see OECD 2010 ) provide an overview of the current state of research on academic achievement, as these studies have investigated established predictors of academic achievement on an international level. Furthermore, these studies, for the first time, have enabled nations to compare their educational systems with other nations and to evaluate them on this basis. However, it should be mentioned critically that this approach may, to some degree, overestimate the practical significance of differences between the countries. Moreover, the studies have increased the amount of attention paid to the role of family background and the educational system in the development of individual performance. The quality of teaching, in particular, has been emphasized as a predictor of student achievement. Altogether, there are valuable cross-sectional studies investigating many predictors of academic achievement. A further focus in educational research has been placed on tertiary educational research. Richardson, et al. 2012 subsumes the individual correlates of university students’ performance.

Hattie, John A. C. 2009. Visible learning: A synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement . London: Routledge.

A quantitative synthesis of 815 meta-analyses covering English-speaking research on the achievement of school-aged students. According to Hattie, the influences of quality teaching represent the most powerful determinants of learning. Thereafter, Hattie published Visible Learning for Teachers (London and New York: Routledge, 2012) so that the results could be transferred to the classroom.

OECD. 2010. PISA 2009 key findings . Vols. 1–6.

These six volumes illustrate the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) 2009—the most extensive international scholastic achievement assessment—regarding the competencies of fifteen-year-old students all over the world in reading, mathematics, and science. Furthermore, the presented results cover the effects of student learning behavior, social background, and scholastic resources. Unlimited online access.

Richardson, Michelle, Charles Abraham, and Rod Bond. 2012. Psychological correlates of university students’ academic performance: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin 138:353–387.

DOI: 10.1037/a0026838

A current and comprehensive review concerning the prediction of university students’ performance, illustrating self-efficacy to be the strongest correlate of tertiary grade point average (GPA). Cognitive constructs (high school GPA, American College Test), as well as further motivational factors (grade goal, academic self-efficacy) have medium effect sizes.

Spinath, Birgit. 2012. Academic achievement. In Encyclopedia of human behavior . 2d ed. Edited by Vilanayur S. Ramachandran, 1–8. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

A current introduction to academic achievement, subsuming research on indicators and predictors of achievement as well as reasons for differences in education caused by gender and socioeconomic resources. The chapter provides further references on the topic.

Walberg, Herbert J. 1986. Syntheses of research on teaching. In Handbook of research on teaching . 3d ed. Edited by Merlin C. Wittrock, 214–229. New York: Macmillan.

A quantitative and qualitative aggregation of a variety of reviews and quantitative syntheses as an overview of early research on educational outcomes. Walberg found nine factors to be central to the determination of school learning.

Woolfolk, Anita. 2007. Educational psychology . 10th ed. Boston: Pearson.

Woolfolk represents a comprehensive basic work that is founded on an understandable and practical communication of knowledge. The perspectives of students as scholastic learners as well as teachers are the focus of attention. Suitable for undergraduate and graduate students. Currently presented in the 12th edition.

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CONCEPTUAL ANALYSIS article

Fostering efl/esl students’ language achievement: the role of teachers’ enthusiasm and classroom enjoyment.

1 College of Foreign Languages, Hebei Agricultural University, Baoding, China
2 Department of English, Hebei University of Chinese Medicine, Shijiazhuang, China

Thanks to the inflow of positive psychology (PP) in language education in general and language learning in particular, extensive consideration has been drawn to the role of emotion in second language acquisition (SLA). Enjoyment as a mutual constructive sensation experienced by students has engrossed academic attention. Likewise, teachers are redirected as the most remarkable figure of any educational association, and their enthusiasm is substantial for students in the classroom. In line with the inquiries of teacher enthusiasm, principles of PP, and classroom enjoyment, the current review strives for this form of connection and its impacts on learners’ achievement. Subsequently, the suggestions of this review for teachers, learners, and educator trainers are deliberated.

Introduction

A central objective of colleges is learners’ achievement and success, whose administration routes should pay great attention to observing learners’ educational performance. As a result, through institutional- and framework-level administration provisions, the quality of learners’ education should be taken into consideration ( Jones, 2013 ). Generally measured with tests, scholastic achievement alludes to what exactly is done under existing conditions that incorporates the most common way of editing and using the construction of information and capacities and a large group of emotional, inspirational, and complex factors that impact definitive reactions ( O’Donnell and White, 2005 ). Academic achievement is defined as the perceived and assessed part of a learner’s mastery of abilities and subject materials as estimated with legitimate and valid tests ( Joe et al., 2014 ). Based on Nurhasanah and Sobandi (2016) , there might be two kinds of factors, internal and external, which influence learning performance and learning success. In addition to issues, such as health, impairments, and cognitive elements (intelligence, aptitude, enthusiasm, concentration, motivation, and fatigue). While learners’ academic achievement and success are influenced by many external elements, including family members, educational environments, and cultural considerations, learner performance and achievement will be affected by these two internal and external elements.

On the significance of feelings in language learning, a great amount of the literature mentioned that feelings assume an indispensable part in students’ performances in a foreign language ( MacIntyre and Vincze, 2017 ; Shao et al., 2019 ). There has been developing attention to feelings in language settings, all the more explicitly, in the way they influence language students’ motivation, praise, interest, commitment, practice, accomplishment, and well-being ( Dewaele et al., 2019 ; MacIntyre et al., 2019 ; Dewaele and Li, 2021 ). Additionally, charged by the introduction of positive psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA; MacIntyre and Gregersen, 2012 ) was the term “affective turn” ( Pavlenko, 2013 ; Prior, 2019 ). Past research acknowledges the effect of negative emotions on language accomplishment ( Ostafin et al., 2014 ; Ford et al., 2019 ).

Nonetheless, dependent on the PP development in instruction, there has lately been a growing extent of the literature on constructive emotions in SLA ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2014 ; MacIntyre et al., 2019 ; Wang et al., 2021 ) provoking analysts to move their enduring attention from negative emotions (L2 stress and boredom) to positive ones (L2 satisfaction; Khajavy et al., 2018 ; Dewaele et al., 2019 ; Derakhshan et al., 2021 ; Dewaele and Li, 2021 ). As opposed to negative emotions, which trigger limited attitudes, positive emotions encourage the expansion of mentalities and discovery of inventive and novel notions, which can prompt the foundation of one’s physical, mental, scholarly, and social assets ( Fredrickson, 2004 ). Moreover, positive emotions are helpful for individual investigation, permitting one to procure new experiences and learn successfully ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2014 ; Xie and Derakhshan, 2021 ).

Accordingly, the range of emotion has been extended past stress to incorporate happiness, love, pride, trust, guilt, disgrace, fatigue, outrage, disappointment, and so on ( Kruk and Zawodniak, 2018 ; Pavelescu and Petric, 2018 ; MacIntyre et al., 2019 ). Among all types of emotions, either negative or positive inspected in the language research trend, Foreign Language Enjoyment (FLE) has been viewed as the most regularly knowledgeable emotional aspect for students ( Piniel and Albert, 2018 ). Classroom enjoyment is perceived as the degree to which L2 learning is regarded as providing joy ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2014 ), which is a constructive emotional state that consolidates challenge, bliss, interest, fun, feeling of pride, and feeling of importance. It happens particularly in exercises where students have a level of independence and when something new or difficult is accomplished ( Csikszentmihalyi and Seligman, 2000 ). FLE had jointly caught great attention for its critical ramifications for L2 results ( Jin and Zhang, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ). It was figuratively theorized as the emotional feet of each L2 student for their prevalence in the L2 learning setting ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In a foreign language setting, enjoyment was picked as a positive equivalent of the broadly studied negative emotion of FLA generally since it is a center part of the foundational notion of PP, i.e., flow ( Csikszentmihalyi, 2014 ).

Furthermore, supported by the broaden-and-build hypothesis, enjoyment is a progressive and emotion-focused action, one that decidedly impacts students’ scholarly presentation and it is an idea that resounds with the arising field of PP ( Pekrun et al., 2007 ; Pekrun and Perry, 2014 ). The primary principle of broaden-and-build is that positive emotion, like enjoyment, can expand people’s thought-action collections and create their mental versatility and individual assets ( Fredrickson, 2003 ; Oxford, 2015 ). Regarding SLA, it is contended that students encountering constructive emotions will assimilate more information and will create more assets for more language education. Conversely, negative emotions will limit students’ concentration and the scope of possible language input. Enjoyment, however, is effective in expanding students’ thought-action collection to assimilate more in language learning and assist them with building language assets ( MacIntyre and Gregersen, 2012 ). In addition, according to the control-value hypothesis ( Pekrun, 2006 ), FLE is a constructive accomplishment emotion with high motivation emerging from progressive learning action or assignment. It has constructive outcomes for different L2 learning results encompassing L2 motivation, commitment, and learning accomplishment ( Li, 2020 ; Dewaele and Li, 2021 ). Since FLE urges students to be innovative and investigate a new language, it triggers foreign language learning ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). Numerous past studies have additionally discovered that enjoyment is commonly connected with less stress and higher educational fulfillment ( Dewaele and Dewaele, 2017 ). Latest movements in PP, nonetheless, have prompted an expansion of studies intended to stimulate the significance of language erudition being triggered by positive emotions, regarding the latter as an enhancer and the main impetus behind SLA ( Oxford, 2015 ). It has been discovered up to date that FLE is positively connected with high scholarly achievement and proficiency in a foreign language ( Hagenauer and Hascher, 2014 ; Dewaele and Alfawzan, 2018 ; Dewaele et al., 2019 ).

Moreover, in comparison with classroom enjoyment, teacher enthusiasm had a noteworthy impact on student-perceived teaching quality. The attitude toward something, generally a nonverbal practice of expressiveness, is known as enthusiasm. Thus, it is characterized as learners’ positive affective qualities, satisfaction, and joy during learning ( Kunter et al., 2011 ). It is a quality-like, constant, and repeating feeling. Since enthusiasm pushes the learner to study and to receive the new cycle being experienced, it cannot be separated from a learning cycle. With enthusiasm, the learners show their delight in learning English by displaying their joyful facial expressions in the class and have a positive sentiment to learning a language. When learning something new like the English language, learners get excited. Enthusiasm can positively impact learners’ results ( Patrick et al., 2000 ). The greater the learners’ enthusiasm in learning a language, the greater the results and the achievements they will encounter in learning.

Enthusiasm, as a significant quality for everyone, pays little heed to the type of work being done. To put it simply, an enthusiastic individual is a person who, in a real sense, is motivated by a strong force. Moreover, the motivated individual comes to perceive himself as a distinguished top pick of the divine nature. When this craze happens, which is the culmination of energy, each fanciful notion is accentuated ( Nur, 2019 ). Educator enthusiasm could be characterized as the occurrence of assorted behavioral articulations, like, nonverbal (gestures) and verbal (tone of voice) practices ( Keller et al., 2016 ).

The prior inquiries were conducted with respect to FLE in higher education ( Dewaele et al., 2016 ; Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ; Elahi Shirvan and Talebzadeh, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Talebzadeh et al., 2020 ). In addition, former studies have presented that teacher enthusiasm is connected to diverse constructive consequences, such as students’ enjoyment, interest, achievement, motivation, and vitality ( Patrick et al., 2000 ; Kunter et al., 2013 ; Keller et al., 2014 ; König and Jucks, 2019 ). Although these investigations have been done in these domains, this review makes an effort to inspect the function of classroom enjoyment and teacher enthusiasm on learners’ achievement in foreign language learning.

Teacher Enthusiasm

Perceived to be a fundamental component for enhancing teaching results is educator enthusiasm, which is quite possibly the main attribute of successful teachers ( Kunter et al., 2011 ; Ruzek et al., 2016 ). Enthusiasm is a feeling based on sensory perception, providing the ability to detect, acknowledge, evaluate, or respond physically to something. A powerful stimulus can create excitement, which results in enjoyment or satisfaction in a particular activity. These definitions are described in terms of their causes and effects ( Setianingsih and Nafisah, 2021 ). There is a theoretical explanation that enthusiasm promotes the attention of educators to their learners in the classroom ( Kunter and Holzberger, 2014 ) and enhances constructive effect in learners by sharing emotive responses ( Frenzel et al., 2018 ) resulting in improved learner relationships and a reduction in conflict ( Kunter et al., 2013 ). Teacher enthusiasm is delineated as a nonverbal manifestation that the educator echoes ( Baloch and Akram, 2018 ); teacher performances like presenting effective demonstrations, facilitating interaction, and communication ( Hadie et al., 2019 ; Wang and Derakhshan, 2021 ); teachers’ distinctive features in line with the constructive emotional state ( Keller et al., 2018 ); and constructive emotive practices that the educator achieves while carrying out her/his responsibility ( Keller et al., 2014 ).

Enthusiasm is an individual’s feeling of getting energized, while acting and it is developed when she/he begins to be interested in the activity. Moreover, it can be characterized as a strong liking for a subject of matter, something, or activity, and a searing soul, fuel, or the blasting fire of something new. Learners regard enthusiasm as the focus of their learning and a prerequisite for their involvement ( Pithers and Holland, 2006 ). Moreover, Kunter et al. (2011) categorized enthusiasm as an emotional-behavioral educator quality. The multiple-dimensional structure includes both a learner’s sense of pleasure, enjoyment, and interest, as well as specific learning activities that promote these feelings in the educational setting. Moreover, it was found that teachers’ enthusiasm for the subject was distinct from their enthusiasm for teaching activities. Keller et al. (2016) described educator engagement as both an emotional and cognitive quality consisting of a favorable psychological state, a sense of enjoyment, and happiness, as well as the exhibiting of specific behaviors (primarily physical) derived from them. Feeling enthusiasm and showing enthusiasm constitute enthusiasm, respectively. By proposing that educator enthusiasm is the emotional experience of pleasure during learning as well as its actions or expression during education, Frenzel et al. (2009) developed this theory. Educators’ expressions of enjoyment include smiles, widening eyes, and a mutable tone, and greater speed. Teacher enthusiasm that could be transferred to learners, boost their enthusiasm, participation, and commitment ( Lazarides et al., 2019 ).

Enjoyment occurs when learners perceive themselves to be competent at performing an educational task as well as recognizing the content of the learning process ( Mierzwa, 2019 ). An enjoyment construct comprises five categories: behavioral, mental, emotional, expressional, and psychological ( Hagenauer and Hascher, 2014 ). In the same way that the name implies, the affective component of enjoyment focuses on emotions, and in particular, on the sense of satisfaction and pleasure felt during the learning process. Additionally, the mental aspect of learning is concerned with evaluating the situation positively. Hence, enjoyment could be considered the feeling of accomplishment that arises when completing a challenging, complex task that encourages inquiry ( Pekrun et al., 2007 ) and creates enthusiasm ( Ainley and Hidi, 2014 ; Han and Wang, 2021 ). Moreover, the motivational aspect of enjoyment refers to learners’ ability to feel good by encouraging them, emotionally and physically, to attempt more FL tasks in the future ( Villavicencio and Bernardo, 2013 ). Since Broaden-and-Build Theory of constructive emotions of Fredrickson (2001) and the Control-Value Theory of emotions ( Pekrun and Perry, 2014 ) both explain how positive emotions appear, it is logical to expect that FLE will perform similarly within the FL context and is deemed as a major source of positive achievement feelings that are directly linked with the enjoyment of flow.

The concept of FLE was introduced by MacIntyre and Gregersen (2012) , explaining how the construct of enjoyment as a feeling associated with achievement could help learners develop resources to learn English more effectively ( Pekrun, 2006 ), enhance their understanding, and improve their motivation in academic learning ( Jin and Zhang, 2019 ). FLE is significantly affected by its educational process, such as the connections with thoughtful and cooperative classmates, as well as the communication with enthusiastic language educators that provide a variety of engaging and challenging classroom activities to engage learners ( Pavelescu and Petric, 2018 ). There are two scopes of enjoyment in FLE: first, FLE is linked to the educator (teaching methods, encouragement, optimism, and educator acknowledgment); second, FLE is associated with the environment in FL education (social contacts, enthusiasm, and motivation; Li et al., 2018 ). A third dimension that is not less important than the two aforementioned is FLE-private coalescing with its contribution to personal development and personal progress. Among the sources of FLE-private, the following can be eminent: realizing one’s progress, achieving great FL results, achieving success, and observing improvements in FL learning ( Li et al., 2018 ).

Implications and Future Directions

This review has provided some suggestions for language stakeholders. It can be of significance for educators, pupils, and educator trainers. Various studies have found that FLE is a motivational force that impacts language learning in several ways as it enables higher academic achievement, enhances motivation, and may even protect individuals against negatively framed views ( MacIntyre, 2016 ). In this sense, FLE provides a useful experience for educational purposes and might be essential for learners to achieve full proficiency in multiple languages. Corresponding to the Control-Value Theory, learners’ ability to internalize values of academic engagement and achievement is likely to be enhanced when their educators demonstrate enthusiasm and enjoyment regarding a particular subject or learning activity ( Pekrun, 2006 ; Derakhshan, 2021 ).

The present review can be valuable for language learners as they can have less anxiety and become more confident and autonomous when facing challenges in the classroom when their educators are enthusiastic. It has been found that enthusiasm can have a major impact on educational success, so it is evident that enthusiasm has a significant effect on learners’ performance and helps them to be successful in academic learning. The educator’s enthusiasm ensures they intend to go above and beyond to fulfill their professional duties, as well as give the correct clues to their learners. As a result, an enthusiastic educator can be defined as one who seeks to accomplish the teaching and learning process effectively and performs his or her duty of supporting the learners as needed for successful teaching and learning. Furthermore, it is the teacher’s concern to control the emotional atmosphere of the classroom, to nurture a positive sense among the students, and, ideally, to teach with excitement, enthusiasm, and interest ( Dewaele et al., 2018 ).

The enthusiasm of the educators will make a difference not only on the learning side, but also during the educational process since educators organize these activities ( Bedir and Yıldırım, 2000 ). An educator should be enthusiastic when performing the teaching duties given to her/him. An educator should adjust the course and tone of voice according to the learners’ interests and abilities during the presentation to ensure that the course is engaging for the learners and demonstrates their enthusiasm for the course ( Keller et al., 2016 ).

Learners who are imitating an enthusiastic educator are likely to acquire the educator’s outlook concerning interest, motivation, and beliefs, leading to enhanced knowledge and a positive attitude toward education ( Keller et al., 2016 ). Developing excitement and enjoyment in teaching and the subject area should be a central element of educators’ training. Additionally, an atmosphere that allows educators to maintain enthusiasm is necessary during their daily work. For example, educators can avoid stressful working conditions by reducing organizational workloads and management responsibilities. Finally, it may be possible to maximize learners’ interest, motivation, and achievement by enhancing educators’ enthusiasm. Throughout the course, letting the learners speak and share their perspectives, engaging, giving advice regarding the accuracy or errors of their statements, and addressing their mistakes are factors that contribute to the enthusiasm of the teacher that leads to students’ achievement. To include the perspectives of other professionals in the field of education, it would be useful to conduct further research on the topic of teacher enthusiasm. Studies involving educators with different levels of knowledge, rather than just new educators, could help to evaluate enthusiasm levels. Additionally, investigators can conduct studies on a national and international basis, regardless of their academic background.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct and intellectual contribution to the work, and approved it for publication.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

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Keywords: positive psychology, classroom enjoyment, EFL/ESL students’ language achievement, teachers’ enthusiasm, constructive sensation

Citation: Liu Y, Zhang M, Zhao X and Jia F (2021) Fostering EFL/ESL Students’ Language Achievement: The Role of Teachers’ Enthusiasm and Classroom Enjoyment. Front. Psychol . 12:781118. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2021.781118

Received: 22 September 2021; Accepted: 14 October 2021; Published: 01 November 2021.

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Copyright © 2021 Liu, Zhang, Zhao and Jia. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Fang Jia, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Open access
Published: 23 October 2023

Effects of students’ self-reflection on improving essay writing achievement among Ethiopian undergraduate students: a counterbalanced design

Hailay Tesfay Gebremariam ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-5748-3192 1 &
Dagnew Mache Asgede ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-1109-4415 1

Asian-Pacific Journal of Second and Foreign Language Education volume 8 , Article number: 30 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

4 Citations

Metrics details

Reflection in education has seen an upsurge in research interest since as reported by Dewey (How we think, Prometheus Books, Buffalo, 1991) ground-breaking work, which plays an integral role in fostering students’ self-reflection and demonstrable learning skills. However there have not been enough studies to determine whether writing instruction from the perspective of self-reflection before action improves undergraduate students' essay writing achievement. This article investigates the effects of Ethiopian university-undergraduate students’ self-reflection before action on their essay writing achievement through the mediation of teaching writing instruction. The study's methodology involved two phases of intervention in a counterbalanced design. The participants were 47 male and female students aged 19–22, from Arba Minch University. They were assigned to a control group and an experimental group using the matched sampling technique. During the first phase, the experimental group (Group A) was instructed to engage in self-reflection-based course activities over a period of two months while the control group was not. In the second phase Group B was engaged in self-reflection-based course activities over a period of two months while Group A was kept under control. To collect data, preliminary students’ self-reflection was provided using an open-ended questionnaire, and pre- and post-tests of writing were given to both groups. Mean and standard deviation statistics were applied after the thematic analysis of the qualitative data. Additionally, a univariate analysis of variance was performed to answer the query regarding the impact of self-reflection on students' essay writing performance. The findings demonstrated that, despite the students encountering numerous difficulties during their essay-writing exercises; the self-reflection-based instruction had a significant positive impact on the participants' essay-writing achievement. In conclusion, the findings have some implications for teaching essay writing instructions.

Introduction

Language learning is concerned with achieving the goals of the four fundamental pillars: listening, speaking, reading, and writing skills. Writing is widely regarded as the most difficult and least liked of the four language abilities (Anh, 2019 ; Defarzio et al., 2019; Sahle et al., 2023 ). However, it also plays an important role in a user's actual writing skills in terms of writing production and communication (Troia et al., 2015 ). Sorenson ( 2010 ) outlines the four skills that a writer must possess: independence, knowledge, skills and sub-skills, fluency, and creativity; Clark ( 2012 ), Cole and Feng ( 2015 ), Huy (2015) and Sommers ( 2006 , 2010 ) all define writing in this manner. According to Clark ( 2012 ), Cole and Feng ( 2015 ), Elkhayma ( 2020 ) and Sommers ( 2010 ), writing skills are essential for reading information, reporting news, and communicating via digital emails and messages.

In Ethiopia primary and junior schools more than 30 languages are used as a medium of instruction (Tesfay, 2017 ) and samples of higher education students' writing skills have been found to be poor and mediocre (AlMarwani, 2020 ; Wondim et al., 2023 ). Moreover, freshmen learners at university are expected to be able to write effectively for both communication and academic purposes (Fareed et al., 2016 ; Rao, 2017 ). To overcome these challenges, students require essay writing assistance at various levels. One approach to addressing students' writing difficulties is to provide them with instruction-based assistance. Therefore, the curriculum of the targeted group of students should be based on writing literacy in order to enhance their learning and enjoyment of using it successfully.

Self-reflection is a contentious issue when it comes to improving writing skills. However, teachers and researchers have different views on its effectiveness (Bubnys, 2019 ; Olteanu, 2017 ; Sumarni et al., 2018 ). While some researchers believe it has a negative impact on learners' writing achievement (Elkhayma, 2020 ), Botelho and Bhuyan ( 2021 ) contend that it is useful in helping learners improve their writing. Furthermore, Edwards ( 2017 ) argued that most previous studies have lacked ecological validity due to their use of one-shot research design (i.e., enhancing writing skill achievement in different independent variables); less is known about counterbalanced designs and their effects on essay writing achievements. Therefore, there is a need for research that target a range of writing improvements while considering different phase of study design incorporating a delayed balance of students with their need-based instruction. Such a study would be more ecologically valid, and could provide more practical and applicable advice to writing skill teachers (Cavilla, 2017 ; Lew & Schmidt, 2011 ; Naidoo et al., 2023 ).

Most of the previous research on self-reflection has focused on its efficacy; however, how learners process and make use of self-reflection has not been sufficiently explored (Botelho & Bhuyan, 2021 ; Klimova, 2014 ). Botelho and Bhuyan ( 2021 ) particularly noted that the processing of self-reflection in class has not been investigated. Although there is substantial evidence that self-reflection helps students’ writing achievement, there is a gap in understanding its effects when used in need-based instruction (Naidoo et al., 2023 ). Additionally, most self-reflection studies have been conducted in health related fields. For example Olteanu ( 2017 ) studied how students used self-reflection to learn from the teacher by facilitating their plan starting from their prior experience. This may be crucial for less proficient essay writers who need particular support (Ismail, 2011 ).

Contemporary studies on essay writng difficulties have been mushrooming in many different settings (Bulqiyah et al., 2021 ). However a study about investigating essay writing difficulties encounteres by higher education institution learners in Ethiopia is still lacked. Therefore, a critical study of university undergraduate students’ essay writng difficulties mus be undertaken through self-reflection instruction. The contribution of the study will be a basis for students’ self-reflection instruction effects in improving essay writing university undergraduate classrooms. Thus, the purpose of this study was to investigate the challenges undergraduate students face when writing essays through self-reflection strategies, as well as the impact that self-reflection-based instruction has on their essay writing achievement. To this end,the following research questions were posed:

What challenges do undergraduate students encounter when writing essays?

Does self-reflection-based instruction improve undergraduate students' essay writing achievement?

Review literature

From the constructivist view point, self-reflection is seen as a tool for improving learners’ knowledge and skills. According to Bubnys ( 2019 ) self-reflection is a method of learning that focuses on one's understanding and practical activities in relation to the learning context. Edwards ( 2017 ) asserts that to properly process reflection before taking action requires focusing on what an experience means. Botelho and Bhuyan ( 2021 ) suggest that self-reflection can be employed to enhance learning, promote autonomy, and transfer some of the responsibility of learning from students to teachers. Furthermore,when facing the challenge of writing an essay, teachers can instruct students to use self-reflection to solve the problems. This adds a new concept of writing process and specific writing standards to the essay writing instruction. It is also work with social-constructivist view of collaboration with their classmates and the small group of teacher-students interaction. Fidelia ( 2015 ), Lew and Schimdt ( 2011 ) and Schmalz et al. ( 2022 ) all suggest that self-reflection-based instruction has a positive effect on learners’ essay writing achievement.

The literature review below, demonstrates potential links between students’ ability to reflect on their own learning and their essay writing success. Although, students can improve their learning through self-reflection, the majority of university students encounter numerous difficulties in developing knowledge-based practices. This implies that the effectiveness of writing exercises is dependent on both prior experience and scientific knowledge of writing processes.

Self-reflection-based instruction

The literature has addressed reflection on action from various angles for a range of purposes. However, restricting reflection before action and in action in essay writing is not common to study. Attention to this neglect and engaging students in their real learning practice is needed (Edwards, 2017 ; Schmalz et al., 2022 ). One example of this is the effect of self-reflection on student learning. For instance, Klimova ( 2014 ), examined the metacognitive process of self-reflection in the context of the autonomous learning approach. The student-centered learning approach which has been embraced by many academics in recent decades is critical for education (Cavilla, 2017 ; Sevilla & Gamboa, 2016 ). Self-reflection can be defined as a process that allows students to pause and reflect on their prior knowledge. While the benefits of self-reflection for students are obvious and understandable, finding these benefits from an instructor's perspective presents significant challenges (Sumarni et al., 2018 ). Self-activity analysis in higher education institutions is a complex learning/teaching process that can be developed both formally and informally (Bubnys, 2019 ).

Dewey ( 1991 ) defines reflection as an active and deliberate process that begins with discomfort over an experience and culminates in knowledge and deeper insights. Recent research (e.g., Botelho & Bhuyan, 2021 ; Olteanu, 2017 ; Sumarni et al., 2018 ) has highlited the importance of self-reflection in the teaching and learning context,particularly in empowering students' writing achievement. Therefore, teachers must closely monitor their students' activities to help them become proficient in essay writing (Fidelia, 2015 ). Self-reflection is a dynamic process that occurs before, during, and after the writing process. It is not about remaining passive and looking back, but about actively engaging with knowledge and experience. Despite the new and deeper understanding and use of knowledge that self-reflection provides, it has received little attention in recent studies (Al Zahrani & Chaudhary, 2020 ; Naidoo et al., 2023 ). Neverthless, students' self-reflection prior to writing instruction encourages teachers to plan their teaching instruction in a need-based manner connecting their students' prior experience with the new instruction. For instance, if students' reflections reveal a lack of understanding of writing criteria, teachers can then announce the writing criteria and their effectiveness.

Recently, self-reflection has been used as a form of course evaluation. The reflective essay does not have a fixed format (Edwards, 2017 ). To understand what writing is and how to write an essay, a solid background in the subject is required. As a result, many students lack the technical and practical skills necessary for essay writing (Fidelia, 2015 ). Structuring an essay requires careful planning (Cavilla, 2017 ; Ferris, 2003 ). To develop the main and auxiliary themes, logic must be used (Bubnys, 2019 ). By using writing techniques such as topic selection, data collection, outlining, drafting, writing, and proofreading in greater detail, you can become more proficient at essay writing by: analyzing the audience or reader; and improving your writing skills (Klimova, 2014 ; Sevilla & Gamboa, 2016 ).

Students’ writing challenges and their achievement

Writing proficiency is required at all educational levels (Kroll, 1990 , 1994 ). According to Dhanya and Alamelu ( 2019 ), students' writing in the early grades may be an attempt to demonstrate that they understand the subject's specialized material, even though it may apear as if they are merely learning how to write. Javed et al. ( 2013 ) suggested that young students must become proficient writers in order to learn new information. Anh ( 2019 ) asserts that having a talent for writing takes work and ongoing study, emphasizing that knowledge of the writing topic and the style of writing are necessary (Hyland, 2003 ; Palanisamy & Abdul Aziz, 2021 ; Sahle et al., 2023 ). Despite this, we were uninterested in writing (Troia et al., 2015 ). Undergraduate university students are required to submit a detailed essay. (Huy, 2015; Hyland, 2003 ). Studies (Cole & Feng, 2015 ; Ferris, 2003 ; Elkhayma, 2020 ; Jannah, 2020 ; Moses & Mohamad, 2019; Suhono, 2017 ) have revealed that university-level undergraduate students' writing development is subpar in terms of writing criteria. Moses and Mohamad (2019) and Rao ( 2017 ) both demonstrate how the requirement for students to practice writing and reading multiple written pieces is essential for the development of writing skills. Additionally, Anh ( 2019 ) noted that a number of issues, including a lack of motivation, a limited capacity for comprehension, and the impact of the writing, can frequently make it difficult to learn to write.

In order to produce quality writing, students must be able to write. According to Huy (2015), many university level undergraduate students lack interest in learning how to write, despite the fact that it is a crucial skill and is often regarded as a difficult and/or sophisticated talent, Moses and Mohamad (2019) investigated whether children who are able to produce quality writing as early as elementary school can comprehend the value of writing and effectivelly practice it. Fareed et al. ( 2016 ) discovered that the majority of university-level undergraduate students have good handwriting, are unaware of the importance of writing skills in their education, and consistently receive low scores on writing skills assessments. Rahmat et al. ( 2022 ) investigated the undergraduate students’ perceived writing difficulties. The results revealed that the students’ writing challenges began with their personal belief that writing is very difficult. This perception may influence the learners’ behavior towards writing essay. Bulqiyah et al. ( 2021 ) also reported that learner’s belief influence the way they view writing skill and its difficultiness. Consequently, Sajjad et al. ( 2021 ) concluded that what learners claimed as difficulties in writing. In addition to their perception and belief to writing as a difficult puts more challenges to the writing process, they faced challenges with word choice, vocabulary and organization.

Despite the importanceof writing is crucial for all students' academic performance, it has still become the onerous skill for them. This situation has occurred in many different contexts around the world with several aspects of writing difficulties like: 1) content knowledge; 2) structural; 3) grammatical; 4) mechanical; and 5) vocabulary (Bulqyiah et al., 2021 ; Defazio et al., 2010 ; Jannah, 2020 ; Rahmat et al., 2022 ; Sahle et al., 2023 ; Tesfay, 2017 ; Toba et al., 2019). As Dhanya and Alamelu ( 2019 ) and Hyland ( 2003 ) have noted. Rao ( 2017 ) articulated the idea of writing as a technique for communicating with others around the world, not just in academia. Therefore, university-level students are expected to write well in order to communicate effectively with the fulfillment of the writng aspects such as content comprehension, idea organization, grammar correctness, word choice, and stylistics (AlMarwani, 2020 ; Deane et al., 2008 ).

Self-reflection and writing achievement

Good writing skills can also help students find a good job after they graduate from college (Fareed et al., 2016 ; Moses & Mohamad, 2019). Ethiopian businesses, for example, now seek out individuals with excellent writing and communication skills to translate documents from one language into another and to provide updates on the status of projects or tasks. Unfortunately, many students are never required to learn how to structure their ideas and write in different styles (Bulqiyah et al., 2021 ; Rahmat et al., 2022 ; Sajjad et al., 2021 ). Writing is often regarded as a difficult skill, especially when students struggle with it. Many students at various educational levels are unaware of the importance of writing skills (Deane et al., 2008 ; Kroll, 1994 ; Troia et al., 2015 ). Dar and Khan ( 2015 ), and Rao ( 2017 ) have argued that numerous errors can be found in undergraduate students' written work. Due to their lack of focus and other issues, most students struggle to write well (Dhanya & Alamelu, 2019 ; Fareed et al., 2016 ).

Many researchers (e.g., Anh, 2019 ; Cole & Feng, 2015 ; Dar & Khan, 2015 ; Deane et al., 2008 ) have discovered that self-reflection writing improves students' academic progress in the classroom as well as their writing skills. Some of them (Dar & Khan, 2015 ; Fareed et al., 2016 ) have concluded that social constructivist view is preferable to uniqueness in the writing process. Previous research (Bulqiyah et al., 2021 ; Huy, 2015) has classified students' writing abilities regards to the writing aspects: (1) word choice; (2) organization; (3) language use; (4) structural organization; and (5) mechanics. Further research into the difficulties that these failed writing products present is still needed. In the this context, two points stand out. Firstly, there is a misconception regarding the importance of writing abilities (Palanisamy & Abdul Aziz, 2021). Most students think it's difficult and/or complicated, and some think the same about handwriting. Secondly, a variety of language education components, including curriculum design at all levels of education, have an effect on writing learning (Anh, 2019 ; Dar & Khan, 2015 ; Deane et al., 2008 ; Defazio et al., 2010 ; Elkham, 2020 ).

To sum up, several studies have approved the positive role of self-reflection on students’ learning achievement particularly their writing skill with regard to the importance of writing accuracy in language learning. This counterbalanced design study can be a step to investigate the effects of self-reflection-based instruction on essay writing due to the lack of studies about the effect of self-reflection-based writing instruction, the study aims to investigate 1) The challenges tha undergraduate students encounter when writing essays; and 2) The effect of self-reflection-based instruction on undergraduate students' essay writing achievement.

This study utilized a counterbalanced design. In the experimental process, this design was used to ensure that the educational delivery between the control and treatment groups was comparable and free of various internal and external influences (Sarkies et al., 2019 ). The design consisted of two phases which separated the participants into two groups (Groups "A" and "B"). In Phase One; Group "A" received a self-reflection-based teaching intervention, while Group "B" served as a control. In Phase Two, Group "B" received a self-reflection-based writing instruction intervention, while Group "A" served as a control. Furthermore, both groups of participants were tested on the same tests before and after each intervention period. The counterbalanced design model used to implement this research is shown in tabular form below (Table 1 ).

Study participants

Participants in the study were first-year students at Arba Minch University in 2020/2021 academic year. As soon as the study participants and their department colleagues gave their consent, the study's formal procedures began. Information was also shared with the participants, and data handling was confidential. Before the study's participants were chosen the written request was granted by the university college dean administration. In addition, the particpants received information about the objective, advantages and risks of the study as they might affect.

The study was conducted on university students, regardless of the university chosen for the intervention process; as long as the purpose and the intervention process of the study remain the same, the results will not differ significantly 47 first-year students (38 females and 9 males at the age range of 19–22 years old) were chosen to participate in the study's intervention process using convenience sampling technique and as they are learning writing skills from the modules organized by the university. The curriculum which the students learn about writing is an education that allows them to practice in an action-oriented manner.

Although the participating students were classified as one group, they were divided into two groups (Group "A" and Group "B") to facilitate the intervention of the counterbalanced design. The distribution of students was based on their test scores. As a result, 47 writing students were ranked first based on their writing proficiency test results. The student with the highest score is then matched with the student with the lowest score, and they were placed in the categories of each group in the ranking order. Using the Matched Sampling method, 24 students from Group "A" and 23 students from Group "B" were selected. Each group took part in the intervention process of a counterbalanced design.

Data collection tools

Based on the study's objectives, the main data collection tools chosen were a reflective open-ended questionnaire and writing skills tests. Prospective students take two consecutive writing skills classes per academic year: basic writing skills and advanced writing skills, with no difference in focus beyond the order of content. Both subjects were studied. The level of students' writing skills was assessed in classroom and out-of-class writing activities during the first basic writing course lessons. It was determined that many of them struggle with basic writing knowledge and techniques. The teacher assigned to the course consulted with other writing experts and collected self-reflection information from the students to identify the problems they faced in essay writing practice. Open-ended questions (for example, what worries you when you think about writing an essay, do you know the criteria of writing, mention the problems you face in the process of writing practice) were presented to reflect the writing disabilities they face individually and the gaps that prevent them from being able to write in the learning and teaching process. The goal was for students to participate in their own learning and teaching process and identify their own problems, so that teachers could focus on solving the writing problems expressed by students.

The Writing Ability Test is the second data collection tool used in this study. Essay writing skills tests were administered to students over two intervention periods. Two experts evaluated two different question strategies and content during each intervention phase to ensure a comparable approach and level of appropriateness. Each essay writing proficiency test consists of three sections and is presented in two application phases in a counterbalanced design. The first section encourages students to write about a memorable experience from their past. The second requires them to read a prompt and respond to it in writing. The third encourages them to reflect their personal position and point of view in writing based on the alternative viewpoints presented. For the second intervention period one of the three questions was a prompt to write an essay explaining the relationship between cause and effect. The second application structure was prepared to prompt on expository essay, providing a reason for writing. The third assignment required students them to write a critical essay based on one extreme of reality and combining it with their personal point of view.

The questions used for data collection instruments in the pre- and post-tests were prepared in four instructions and different topics or guides for each session. In each exam, four topics were presented, and students were asked to choose two of the optional topics and write about them. The instructions presented in the pre- and post-tests were as Table 2 .

Students were expected to write at least two of the questions based on the instructions and alternative topics. Each student's written paper was graded using the rubric, which included content, organization, word choice and use, language use (grammar), and mechanics or writing style. To ensure the accuracy of the pre- and post-tests, three professional teachers checked the test for validity issues. As a result, each participating student was required to write three essays in each of the essay writing skills tests.

Validity and reliability of data collection tools

Although there was no difference in the scores of the writing skills tests administered during the two intervention periods, the questions were balanced and divided into two types. During the pilot study, two-choice questions were presented in three sections to broaden students' writing options on the writing skills test. However, when students wrote essays on various topics, the correcting teachers reported difficulty in correcting and grading them. There may also be a test adaptation effect when writing essays using the same questions over time. Thus, out of the six optional topics included in the pilot study (three optional topics/questions for writing three essays), it was appropriate to include three questions in the two equivalent tests presented during each application for the main study. In order to reduce the effect of test adaptation, the essay writing tests given at each level have used questions with similar content and approach. Three applied linguists with a second degree or higher were evaluated using the test criteria to ensure that the tests were of the same level and weight. In particular, to ensure that the tests did not fall outside of the curriculum, their content is related to essay structure methods, they were free of gender and physical injury issues, they were of appropriate weight and language level, and structural characteristics were emphasized. This is done to avoid test adaptation and repetition.

Ten open-ended questions were prepared and evaluated by three appropriate teachers based on Ferris' ( 2003 ) composition evaluation criteria. The teachers were asked to rate their level of agreement using numbers (4, 3, 2, 1) representing the ten evaluation criteria from highest to lowest agreement options. The three remaining open-ended questions invite the evaluator teachers to share their thoughts. Cronbach's Alpha values of 0.778, and 0.714 were calculated for the three assessors' results in terms of cross-validation reliability. Pearson's correlation coefficient, r = 0.982, was used to calculate the correlation between the two scores. Both tests showed that the level of consistency was acceptable and that the results were very close. The findings indicated that the tests' content validity was satisfactory. Furthermore, the form and content of the tests were revised and redrafted based on the evaluators' responses and comments to the open questions.

Following each practice session, the general essay writing ability scores were examined using a cross-sectional reliability statistic to determine their level of reliability. Thus, in the first phase, the writing ability test was measured to be 0.935, and in the second phase, 0.788. According to Pallant's ( 2011 ) level classification, when Pearson's correlation coefficient was calculated to confirm the correlation between the results of the two tests, a high correlation (r = 0.72) was observed. The correlation score indicates not only the equivalence of the tests, but also the reliability of the data obtained from the tests. Thus, the results obtained from writing skills are reliable as their reliability levels are greater than 0.7 during the first and second phases.

Finally, the distribution consistency test was used to determine whether the students' scores in both application periods were distributed consistently. The Kolmogorov-Sminov test was used to separate the treatment and control groups' results. Furthermore, the consistency of the distribution of the students’ essay writing ability test results in all methods of testing was confirmed by inspecting the related column and bar graphs for the total result. This showed that the distribution of the results met the criteria for using parametric tests to answer the first question of this study.

Following the design of the study, appropriate precautions were taken to avoid any issues in its application of the study. In terms of the education system, the goals, content tasks, and explanations of the education in which the study was implemented were presented in a natural manner. To investigate the role of individualized teaching in improving students’ writing skills a teaching tool was created and integrated with the teaching contents and activities of the essay writing lesson only for the experimental groups in both intervention periods. The selected content and activities were made compatible with the purpose of the modularization curriculum and the content and activities in the writing course. Essay writing processes, essay structural parts (introduction, body, and conclusion), essay structuring methods (argumentative, descriptive, narrative, compare and contrast, cause and effect, analytical, and process analysis), and structural essays were covered. The content and activities included activities that allow students to structure the process of writing an essay (selecting a topic, planning, organizing, drafting, writing, editing, and proofreading). Practice relationships include narrative, descriptive, cause and effect, compare and contrast, and process analysis. These activities in both intervention periods began by introducing students to the nature and distinguishing features of the activity writing content in each class. Then, after presenting each of the essay practice topics separately, students were asked to follow the writing skills process and write an essay.

In the 2020/2021 academic year, first semester, the basic writing skill course given in the first lesson was collected individually to identify the students’ writing problems and analyzed separately according to their themes. Prior to the intervention of the study, certain precautions were taken such as approval of the study site and participants, as well as clearly stating the purpose of the study. The researcher then explained the purpose and intervention of the program to the coordinator and teachers of the classroom requesting permission to teach in the classroom. By meeting with the participants chosen for the study, it was possible to confirm their willingness by explaining the purpose of the study. Finally, after giving their permission to participate, the introduction of the course, which was found in the first chapter, Essay Writing Procedures, began on February 18, 21, 26, and 29, 2020/2021 academic year. For two weeks (two days a week, Monday and Thursday, two hours each day), students studied together without being divided into two groups. The lesson was presented in the usual manner of writing an essay, and the lesson they took together was an introduction to essay. Writing aiming to introduce the procedures needed to write an essay.

Students were tested on Thursday, February 29th, 2020/2021 academic calendar, after learning the first essay introduction chapter together. Because the participating students who took the test were only one group (47 students) according to the class classification, and the balanced design required at least two groups, they were divided into two groups to participate in the study using the Matched Sampling Method. As a result, the students who took part were divided into two groups based on their results. By matching those with high and low results, the classification process was made from two extremes to the middle. During this process, two groups called "A" and "B" were formed. Each application period, the two teams were judged, with group "A" judging the first phase and group "B" judging the second. Conversely, in the first phase, group "B" was in control, and in the second phase, group "A" was in control.

Before the study's intervention, the nature and purpose of the course and the coordinated intervention were explained to the participating students in each phase so they could understand the presentation of the course and the processes of its intervention. The intervention process of the study was also explained to the participating students during the intervention process. The tests and lesson activities were described in terms of writing proficiency, as well as their types, features, and organizational framework. Results from each test were provided along with an explanation of why and how those results were anticipated for each test and task. Choosing a starting point (reason for writing) or a model topic was the first step in each essay writing lesson's application period. This was followed by planning (selecting and narrowing a topic, gathering and vetting information, organizing and sharing information), and drafting (writing and organizing an idea as it is downloaded).

The primary interventions took place between March 3rd and May 29th, 2020/2021 academic year (48 h—two days a week). The participating group for the first stage of the intervention was "A". Justice's intervention began on March 3rd, and concluded on April 11th. (for 24 h, two days a week). The students (group B) who remained under control during the first phase of the intervention participated in the second phase of the justice intervention. This intervention was carried out between April 15th and May 23th, (24 h, two days a week).

Data analysis

The first step was to determine the equivalence level of the students who had been divided into two groups using the kinship sampling method and had to participate in two intervention periods. The Kolmogorov-Sminov test was then followed by a sample analysis to determine the consistency of the distribution of the results yielding a t(45) = − 0.067, p = 0.948. Descriptive statistics a p-plote, and a counterbalanced design were used to examine the mean scores from the two groups on the tests of their essay-writing abilities during both intervention periods. An independent samples t-test was then employed to calculate the test scores of essay writing ability with the first intervention. Levene’s Test for Equality of Variance was then used to examine the outcomes of both interventions. If the test results showed a significant difference ( p .05) between the justice and control groups, the magnitude of the difference was calculated using partial eta coefficients. Additionally, if there was a difference in the results of both intervention periods, the partial eta square of intensity level was calculated. In the fair group analysis, the results of the control group students were subjected to both t-test and covariance analysis methods and Levene's Tests of Between-Subjects Effects confirmed the possible differences between the groups. This statistical procedure was used because it is a better option for measuring the effect of judgment on writing ability (Pallant, 2011 ) by reducing the Within-Group Error Variance of dependent and independent subjects.

Ethical consideration

The manuscript is unique, and the data reflect the actual achievements of the undergraduate students who took part. It has not been published in any form or language, in part or in its entirety, anywhere else. The outcomes are presented clearly, truthfully, and without fabrication, falsification, or improper data manipulation. There is no representation of information, text, or concepts by others as though they were the author's original work, with appropriate acknowledgement of others' works taken into account. Before implementing the intervention, official letters were obtained from the respected body and used to contact participants at the study site. The data collection process, including the experiment was approved by two reviewers assigned by the Research Development Committee (RDC) of the College of Social Science and Humanities. All the participants were informed that they could voluntarily take part in the study and the results would be used for educational purpose.

To collect data, a self-reflection strategy was used, with structured open-ended questionnaires divided into two sections. The first data component corresponds to the first study question: students' self-reflection strategies. The data collected through the self-reflection open-ended questionnaires were coded and thematically analyzed in the first subsection of the data analysis. The data gathered through essay writing tests in the pre-test and two phases of the main interventions were then presented and analyzed in the second subsection of the data analysis section.

Challenges in essay writing achievement

Undergraduate university students were found to be prone a range of writing challenges. Data from the self-reflection-based open-ended questionnaire was used to answer the first research question. Data coding and thematic classification were employed to identify the core challenges encountered in the essay writing classroom when analyzing and determining the participants' writing challenges through self-reflection. The data from the structured open-ended questionnaire was used to illustrate the depth of students' reflections on issues with writing skills through data coding and thematic description, as displayed in Table 3 .

The data gleaned from the students' self-reflection was primarily used to answer the first question. The findings in Table 3 revealed the obstacles to writing effectively for university-undergraduate students. The students faced numerous challenges during their essay writing practice, which hindered their writing achievement. As a result, the results were organized into three themes; misconceptions about writing standards, lack of practice during the learning stages, and a lack of writing invitations. To summarize, the results of Ethiopian university-undergraduate students' self-reflection appear reasonable, indicating that the students faced numerous challenges during essay writing practice.

Many of the targeted students identified the main issue as a misunderstanding of the importance of writing abilities. Three students' reflections are provided below.

What is the nature of writing? … I'm having trouble grasping the concept of writing.... The problem is a misunderstanding of the writing procedures. It does not appeal to me.... (St, 42) ... The most difficult aspect of writing is underestimating the importance of writing skills.... (St, 10) The fundamental flaw in my writing is a misunderstanding of how paragraphs develop. I can't write a complete paragraph by connecting distinct sentences logically. (St, 2)

Based on the three factors listed above, the majority of the targeted students' self-reflection agreed that there was a misunderstanding of writing skill methods and criteria. Additionally, seven students discussed their writing concerns in their self-reflection. The outcomes of the challenges were identified by the targeted group of university-undergraduate students, who were unconcerned about the importance of writing, lacked concept generation, and demonstrated less proficiency in organizing their thoughts. Furthermore, some students' misconceptions about their writing abilities have resulted in a misinterpretation of writing requirements and procedures.

My problem with writing an essay starts with deciding on a topic. When writing an essay, I can't help but use specific knowledge. I'm not familiar with the characteristics of effective writing. I also struggle with grammar and writing style. Anyone attempting to read my writing will notice that it is a mash-up of many accents. … (St, 38)

Different students described the difficulties they encountered during the writing skills practice in various ways. These seven students' perspectives on the challenges of practicing writing skills were highlighted, and some of them mentioned the following in their written self-reflection:

I'm even more terrified when I think back on what I've written. Whatever I write is difficult to read and comprehend.... My written concept is incomplete because it lacks a clear topic definition and development framework.... (St, 12) … Writing is difficult for me. I have the ability to come up with ideas in my head. But it is difficult for me to write them adequately. (St, 11)

The students were confronted with reflected descriptions related to the second thematic showing challenges in their writing skills due to a variety of factors, including a misunderstanding of the boundaries of writing skills, unreadability of written essays, lack of teachers' commitment, and a lack of experience writing during their learning years.

Effects of self-reflection-based instruction on writing achievement

The data from the essay writing tests were used to answer the paper's second research question. The central tendency of mean values and standard deviations were used to analyze and determine the participants' essay writing achievement, as shown in Table 4 .

Table 4 displays descriptive statistics for Ethiopian university undergraduate students' essay writing achievement in the pre-test and two experimental phases. The mean pre-test scores for the experimental and control groups are M = 16.792; SD = 3.683 and M = 16.957; SD = 3.082, respectively. The experimental group A (M = 20.958; SD = 2.985) outperformed the control group B (M = 16.319; SD = 2.755) in the first phase of the intervention. Finally, the second phase of the intervention reveals that the experimental group B (M = 20.125; SD = 1.793) and the control group A (M = 20.348; SD = 2.551) have interrelated results. However, the mean values and standard deviations cannot be used to determine whether there are statistically significant differences between the experimental and control groups in the pre-test and the two phases of the intervention in this study. To that end, the univariate analysis of variance test was used to see if there were statistically significant differences in students' essay writing achievement, as shown in Tables 5 , 6 , and 7 .

Univariate analysis of variance was used to determine whether there was a statistically significant difference between the mean scores of the pre-test results of the university-undergraduate students. The analysis results, indicated that the pre-test results of the two groups did not differ statistically significantly at F(1,45) = 0.028, p = 0.869, eta square = 0.001. This demonstrated that the two participant groups were matched to the treatment; the participant students had comparable essay writing achievement. Thus, the first phase of the intervention was carried out, and the essay writing test results were analyzed as shown in Table 6 .

Table 6 shows the mean scores of university-undergraduate students' essay writing achievement in the experimental and control groups of the first phase intervention. The statistical analysis revealed a statistically significant difference between the experimental and control groups of the intervention at F(1,45) = 30.585, p = 0.000, eta squared = 0.405. According to Pallant ( 2011 ), this eta squared can be seen as a high effect size. Thus, based on the previous effect size boundaries indicated that, this study yields a 40.5%, implying that there is a significant relationship between the students' self-reflection-based teaching and essay writing achievement. It can be stated that students’ self-reflection-based instruction had a high effect on the Ethiopian university-undergraduate students’ essay writing achievement. To see if there is a significant difference between the two counterbalanced groups in the delayed second phase intervention; Table 7 needs to be examined.

As shown in Table 7 , there is no statistically significant difference between two counterbalanced groups at F(1,45) = 0.121, p = 0.730, and eta square = 0.003. This result, however, is due to the study's design: both groups participated in both experimental and control interventions. Thus, the finding does not imply that self-reflection-based instruction had no effect on Ethiopian university-undergraduate students' essay writing achievement at a 0.05 level. In contrast, the results show that there is a significant relationship between the students' self-reflection-based instruction and their essay writing achievement. As a result of the two counterbalanced experiments and controlled interventions, it is revealed that the effectiveness of self-reflection on students' essay writing achievement plays an important pedagogical role.

Finally, the overall results of the Ethiopian University-undergraduate students were calculated as the sum of the study findings. After balancing the two phases of the interventions, the results were found to be statistically similar. The implication of this similarity after the counterbalanced design implementation in estimated marginal means is that different students' self-reflection-based instruction influenced their essay writing achievement differently. As a result, the implementation model is illustrated in Fig. 1 .

The Process of counterbalanced design and its expected results

Despite the need to investigate the gaps and niches in students' essay writing classrooms, there is insufficient empirical data to support the effectiveness of self-reflection in learners' pedagogical knowledge and skills (AlMarwani, 2020 ). Thus, the primary goal of this study was to examine the effectiveness of self-reflection-based instruction on Ethiopian university-undergraduate students' essay writing achievement using the most appropriate methodological design. As such, the first purpose of the study was theoretically well known due to its difficulty in improving writing skills in classrooms. To that end, there is a need to address this difficult situation in the field of writing skills in relation to the development of learners' essay writing achievement through various pedagogical approaches and study designs. Consequently, the purpose of this study was to take a step towards addressing this need. Furthermore, the second goal of this study had a motivational impact on the improvement of learners' writing achievement. As a result, the study examined the effect of students' self-reflection-based instruction on essay writing achievement among Ethiopian university-undergraduate students, due to the scarcity of studies determining the effectiveness of students' self-reflection on essay writing achievement.

This study sought to identify the primary challenges encountered during writing practice. The data transcribed and thematically classified revealed three types of issues affectingstudents' writing achievement: misconception about writing standards, lack of practice during learning stages, and dislike of writing. The findings suggested that these challenges are critical issues in learners' essay writing achievement. Which is consistent with previous studies exploring challenges encountered during writing instruction (AlMarwani, 2020 ), and student problems in their written works (Palanisamy & Abdul Aziz, 2021 ).

Writing is the most important literary requirement for global communication (Dhanya & Alamelu, 2019 ). It is also the most difficult skillto master (Palanisamy & Abdul Aziz, 2021), and is essential for for writing experts and global communication demands (Fareed et al., 2016 ). The new findings of this study suggested that writing skills are not seen as difficult in series and that the problem of writing does not begin in elementary school. These findings overlapped with previous research. (AlMarwani, 2020 ; Elkhayma, 2020 ; Moses and Mohamad, 2019). According to Huy (2015) and Moses and Mohamad (2019), writing is a difficult skill to master, especially in university-undergraduate, when students face numerous obstacles, and the problem of writing begins in elementary school.

The qualitative findings of this study support and validate previous research and observations about essay writing achievement. Huy (2015) and Palanisamy & Abdul Aziz ( 2021 ) also show that many university-undergraduate students are unaware of the importance of writing abilities and do not practice in a variety of ways. Additionally, students' written work often contains numerous errors, due to poor concentration skills when writing. The result was consistent with the findings of Bulqiyah et al. ( 2021 ), Rahmat et al. ( 2022 ) and Sajjad et al. ( 2021 ). For example, Bulqiyah et al. ( 2021 ) and Rahmat et al. ( 2022 ) revealed that the difficulties of writing began with the learners’ perception toward their writing skills. The perceptions may influence the learners’ behavior towards writing practice and the overall their writing performance.

The second research question of this study was to investigate whether self-reflection-based instruction had any effect on the essay writing achievement of Ethiopian university undergraduate students. According to Fidelia ( 2015 ), essay writing is a fundamental skill of the arts requiring students to organize their thoughts clearly and effectively. To assess this, prior to the intervention of the two-phase approach research design, the participants had comparable results ( p = 0.869) in their essay writing achievement. Following the first phase intervention, univariate analysis of variance, revealed that self-reflection-based instruction had a significant effect on the essay writing achievement of the participant students. The findings agree with those of Meza et al. ( 2020 ), who discovered that implementing self-reflection learning led to improved self-reflection-based instruction. Additionally, Botelho and Bhuyan (2020) investigated self-reflection before action in clinical sessions to determine if students could identify their problems and clear their doubts before entering clinics. The students were able to recall and practice clinical procedure knowledge, and felt well prepared and confident in their performance.

The results of the second research question, on the other hand, contrast with those reported by Olteanu ( 2017 ), who investigated reflection for action in relation to the goal of learning and discovered that self-reflection for action essays were limited to preparing for the improvement of learning in the actual curriculum in Sweden. Moreover, Suhono ( 2017 ) found that language learners with lower levels of writing proficiency may be unable to identify and correct problems encountered during writing practice. According to Lew and Schmidt ( 2011 ), there is a limited extent of self-reflection and academic performance relationships. Furthermore, Bubnys ( 2019 ) showed that self-reflection effectiveness is related to students with low learning achievement.

After all, the results of the second phase of the intervention showed no significant difference between the two group of participants who took part in both control and experimental interventions based on the counterbalanced design model. This similarity in the results of the second phase of the intervention confirmed that self-reflection has a significant effect on Ethiopian university-undergraduate students' essay writing achievement. According to Meza et al. ( 2020 ), students' self-reflection improves their writing skills by expanding their cognitive and metacognitive abilities. These findings were consistent with the findings of Klimova ( 2014 ) and Sumarni et al. ( 2018 ). Klimova ( 2014 ) demonstrated the importance of self-reflection for students to learn about their experiences and think critically about what they have learned. It is also a valuable source for teachers as it enables them to assess to success of their teaching and to reconsider their teaching methods, strategies, and activities based on the students' reflections. Additionally, Sumarni et al. ( 2018 ) revealed the impact of students' reflection on creative writing achievement. The results showed that reflection-based instruction improved the creative writing abilities of 76% of the participants.

Although the current study revealed the positive effect of students’ self-reflection-based instruction in essay writing, some issues may influence the intervention process of essay writing. For instance, the perception of students toward writing is questionable. According to Rahmat et al., ( 2022 ), many of university undergraduate students have fear of learning essay writing, initially as they perceive it as a difficult. Moreover, some discrepancies can be attributed to contextual variables and distinctions in teachers’ understanding of the research focus and assessment rubrics.

Conclusions

The study suggests that self-reflection-based instruction for students prior to essay writing may be effective in improving their writing achievement. Despite the fact that students often struggle with essay writing, this study provides an insightful reminder that this problem can be addressed through self-reflection-based instruction. The current habit of self-reflection before action should be intentionally used and reconfigured in educational classrooms. Furthermore, the current study results stimulate further research into the utility of self-reflection-based instruction and reflection before action for a wide range of students. This implies that students' prior experience might be explored before implementing course content in the field.

To shed more light on the interactive process of self-reflection in essay writing and related fields of language education requires attention. Related to this, future research needs to be conducted within the context of a longer instructional program with ecological valid writing essays and where self-reflection is meaningful for the language learners because it has a clear purpose. In many ways, the self-reflection instruction aids in the development and practice of writing skills. Understanding the significance of writing and its components, such as ideas, organization, language use, word choice, and writing style, is essential for effectiveness. To that end, students should be given writing practice from the start of writing skills classes, possibly as early as primary school, to help them become proficient in their educational age.

Availability of data and materials

All the data are available upon the request of the editors and/or reviewers and the corresponding author can provide them.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the students and teachers, who participated as data sources in this research and once again we thank to the reviewers and students’ test evaluators during the implementation of the study for their constructive comments.

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The corresponding author, HTG, designed the study proposal, collected the data, analyzed it, and prepared the final manuscript. The co-author, DMA, contributed to the manuscript's development by guiding the preparation of the proposal and translating from Amharic to English. Both authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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Gebremariam, H.T., Asgede, D.M. Effects of students’ self-reflection on improving essay writing achievement among Ethiopian undergraduate students: a counterbalanced design. Asian. J. Second. Foreign. Lang. Educ. 8 , 30 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40862-023-00203-7

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Home — Essay Samples — Education — Student Life — Academic Achievements

Essays on Academic Achievements

Brief description of academic achievements.

Academic achievements encompass a wide range of accomplishments in the academic realm, including but not limited to academic awards, research publications, academic presentations, and other notable achievements in educational settings. These achievements demonstrate a student's commitment to excellence, dedication to learning, and mastery of academic subjects.

Importance ... Read More Brief Description of Academic Achievements

Importance of writing essays on this topic.

Essays on academic achievements are significant as they provide an opportunity for students to reflect on their educational journey, showcase their accomplishments, and highlight the impact of their academic pursuits on their personal and professional development. Writing about academic achievements also allows students to share their experiences, challenges, and triumphs, inspiring others and contributing to the academic discourse.

Tips on Choosing a Good Topic

Reflect on personal growth: Choose a topic that showcases your growth, challenges overcome, and lessons learned in your academic journey.
Highlight unique accomplishments: Select a topic that highlights a specific academic achievement that sets you apart from others.
Connect to future goals: Consider topics that align with your future academic or career aspirations, demonstrating relevance and foresight in your essay.

Essay Topics

The impact of academic achievements on personal development
Overcoming academic challenges and achieving success
The role of mentorship in academic accomplishments
Academic achievements and their influence on career prospects
The significance of academic awards and recognitions
Balancing academic achievements with extracurricular activities
The value of research publications in academic achievements
Reflecting on academic achievements in a reflective essay
The impact of academic achievements on self-esteem and confidence
The role of perseverance in academic success

Concluding Thought

Writing essays on academic achievements provides an opportunity for self-reflection, celebration of accomplishments, and sharing valuable insights with others. By exploring the diverse facets of academic achievements through writing, students can gain a deeper understanding of their educational journey and contribute to the broader conversation on academic excellence. Dive into the world of academic achievements through essay writing and uncover the profound impact of your scholarly pursuits.

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Academic success is important because it is strongly linked to the positive outcomes. Adults who are academically successful and with high levels of education are more likely to be employed, have stable employment, have more employment opportunities than those with less education and earn higher salaries, are more likely to have health insurance, are less dependent on social assistance, are less likely to engage in criminal activity, are more active as citizens and charitable volunteers and are healthier and happier.

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Evaluative language in undergraduate academic writing: expressions of attitude as sources of text effectiveness in English as a Foreign Language

The purpose of this paper is to explore whether the use of attitudinal language stands as a potential source of effectiveness in undergraduate academic writing in English as a Foreign Language (EFL). In order to achieve this purpose, interpersonal features of a corpus of essays written by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature were analyzed. The model of appraisal (Martin, James R. & Peter R. R. White. 2005. The language of evaluation: Appraisal systems in English . Basingtoke: Palgrave Macmillan) was used to trace and contrast attitude resources of affect, judgement and appreciation in academic essays in relation to the grades they were granted by university professors at different levels of instruction. The results of the study confirm a significant relation between the use of resources of attitude and the perceived (in)effectiveness of the analyzed texts, as well as factors which potentially determine the nature of such relation and pose relevant implications for academic writing instruction in EFL in the context of the analyzed corpus.

1 Introduction

Writing academically in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) is widely recognized as central to undergraduate education due to its role as the main means of production and dissemination of knowledge in international contexts ( Nesi and Gardner 2012 ). Academic writing is also considered as an activity which involves complex sets of skills that even expert writers keep on improving after continued experience ( Chazal 2014 ). As part of such complexity, the appropriate expression of interpersonal meanings has been found to be one of the most challenging components when learning how to write academically ( Hood 2010 ), mainly because of the pedagogical challenges involved in an appropriate induction of learners into the linguistic conventions developed by specialized discourse communities to produce interpersonal meanings.

Different from skills and competencies related to the communication of factual information and conventional paradigms of textual organization, construing interpersonal meanings involves the use of linguistic resources to express interaction among speakers, as well as the communication of the feelings and points of view they intend to share ( Moss 2011 ). Interpersonal meanings also convey social roles and evaluations ( Hyland 2005 ), as well as the speakers’ expression of a subjective reality, which conveys social relations, personal values, and different kinds of opinions they want to share with other speakers ( Perales et al. 2012 ). Additionally, the expression of interpersonal meanings relates to authorial presence, also known as stance, in academic texts; “how writers present themselves and express their own views and judgements” in relation to others ( Candarli et al. 2015 : 193). Because of their discourse semantic nature, the workings of these dynamics and their rhetorical effects might make it harder for learners of EFL academic writing to acquire, observe, and evaluate than grammatical and organizational features, as attested by observations like Lancaster’s (2014) , who has referred to interpersonal dynamics as recurring patterns of language use that are difficult to notice from casual scanning.

As explained by Ken Hyland, research has shown that fundamental challenges in teaching and learning interpersonal conventions in writing are found in two main sources of difficulties. For one thing, despite its actual social nature, academic writing may still be regarded as objective, rational and impersonal, which results in a neglection of the fact that academic, disciplinary practices involve variations in systems “of appropriate social engagement with one’s material and one’s colleagues” ( Hyland 2004 : 11). Additionally, cultural factors that shape students’ expectations, strategies, beliefs and, in general, schemas of knowledge and the whole process of learning also present learners with important challenges; besides the acquisition of grammatical structures, lexical resources, and notions of textual organization, learners writing in EFL have to deal with differences between diverse cultural conceptualizations of knowledge construction and communication. While certain cultures tend to favor “an analytical, questioning, and evaluative stance to knowledge”, others “have a very different perspective that favors conserving and reproducing existing knowledge” ( Hyland 2003 : 38).

Hyland’s considerations coincide with Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) observations about what they call writing cultures , which result from the fact that “each educational system creates its unique mixture of educational genres, writing/learning practices, assessment procedures, instructional materials, expectations towards writing, and required writing competencies, in varied relationships with the genres and practices of professional or scientific domains” (p. 153). An imminent consequence of this is that communities of learners and individual writers carry particular writing dynamics acquired from their various experiences, many of which differ significantly from each other. Thus, students learning how to write in EFL face the challenge to adjust – to lesser or greater degrees – to generalized conventions according to which they are expected to demonstrate their knowledge by voicing their judgements and putting their opinions forward in certain ways. Adjusting appropriately to such conventions may result in effective writing, which has been defined by Vega (2015) as the instantiation of argumentation which appropriately accommodates to the audience’s framework of attitudes and beliefs, gaining force in its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals.

Based on the consideration that the expression of interpersonal meanings plays an important role in the production of successful written academic texts and, as a result, may represent a significant source of (in)effectiveness in academic writing, several works have analyzed the use of interpersonal resources by undergraduate students in EFL in diverse international contexts. Some of such works have explored this dimension of academic writing from the perspective of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model ( Candarli et al. 2015 ; Crosthwaite and Jiang 2017 ; Lee and Deakin 2016 ), while others have adopted the systemic-functional perspective of the appraisal model ( Martin and White 2005 ) as their theoretical and methodological basis ( Derewianka 2007 ; Lee 2008 , 2015 ; Mei 2006 , 2007 ; Ryshina-Pankova 2014 ).

Despite the abundant production of research this subject has seen around the globe, the exploration of the relationship between interpersonal resources and effectiveness in academic EFL writing has not received much attention in Mexico and Latin America, where most related research has focused on academic writing in Spanish L1 ( Castro 2013 ; Castro and Sánchez 2013 ; González 2011 ; Ignatieva 2021 ; Navarro 2014 ; Valerdi 2021 ; Zamudio 2016 ). It is also worth noticing that, as it will be shown in further sections of this paper, most previous works beyond Latin American contexts have explored the interpersonal discourse of EFL writers from disciplines which require effective communication in English, but not the professional mastery or depth that is expected from future professionals of the English Language and Literature at different levels of linguistic and disciplinary instruction. Such potential mastery and depth in knowledge represent the need to analyze the workings of interpersonal language considering as many realizational variables as possible. Stemming from this, the objective of this paper is to use qualitative and quantitative research methods to analyze the use of interpersonal resources in a corpus of academic essays written in EFL by Mexican undergraduate students of English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico. This exploration is developed within the framework of Martin and White’s (2005) model of appraisal with specific focus on the system of attitude and the instantiation variables of attitudinal category, realization, explicitness, trigger, and authorship. In this work, I compare the features of attitudinal realizations in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays in order to understand the relationship between the use of attitudinal language and the perceived effectiveness of the essays where it is instantiated. Additionally, the features of the evaluative language in the corpus are observed in relation to the instructional and linguistic experience of the undergraduate authors of the texts, which were classified as basic, intermediate, and advanced.

In the following section, a brief account of the system of attitude is presented with particular focus on the categories that have been analyzed in this research. This is followed by an account of previous works that have explored the relationship between attitudinal language and the (in)effectiveness of academic writing by undergraduate EFL learners from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Then, a description of the mixed methodological approach which was applied in this research is presented. Finally, I report the most significant findings of this work in order to discuss their implications to teaching academic writing in EFL in the Mexican context.

2 The appraisal model and the system of attitude

Martin and White (2005) developed the appraisal model as an extension of the analysis of the interpersonal metafunction proposed in Halliday’s Systemic Functional Grammar (1985 , 2004 . While Halliday describes this metafunction at the lexicogrammar stratum in terms of the clause as an exchange through the system of mood , the appraisal model approaches the expression of feelings, points of view and social relations at the stratum of discourse semantics through the systems of attitude , engagement , and graduation . The first one involves the discursive negotiation of emotion-related meanings (feelings, moral/ethical judgements, and aesthetic responses), while the second one relates to the speaker’s positioning in relation to other voices. The system of graduation has to do with the resources deployed to intensify and attenuate realizations of attitude and engagement ( Martin and White 2005 ).

This paper is concerned with the system of attitude , which encompasses the linguistic expression of emotions and their institutionalization as opinions related to the notions of ethics and aesthetics. The ultimate objective of using these resources is to share subjective points of view for the audience to consider them and, if the discourse is successful, adhere to them. In this sense, the expression of attitude is central for speakers’ argumentation of their positions and the representations of the world they communicate since “it is possible to adhere oneself not only to a thesis, but also to ways of thinking, seeing, and feeling” ( Amossy 2009 : 67–68). Thus, considering Vega’s definition of effectiveness (2015) as argumentation which accommodates to the audience’s attitudes and beliefs in order to increase its adhesion to the speaker’s proposals, the rhetorical effects of communicating one’s propositions accompanied by attitudinal evaluations may have the potential to enhance the effectiveness of the produced text beyond the scope of its objective contents.

In the model of appraisal , expressions of attitude are analyzed in terms of three sub-systems: affect , judgement , and appreciation . Affect relates to the linguistic realization of feelings, considered as the most basic forms of personal reaction in human linguistic development ( Martin 2000 ; Painter 2003 ; Torr 1997 ). These expressions are usually classified into the categories of +/− happiness [“affairs of the heart” ( Martin and White 2005 : 49)], +/− security (related to ecosocial well-being and sensations of anxiety and confidence), +/− satisfaction (linked to the satisfaction of personal needs and goals) and +/− desire (involving the willingness or attraction towards entities and processes). Prototypically, instances of affect are lexically realized in the form of qualities (attributes and epithets), mental and behavioral processes, and modal adjuncts. Table 1 illustrates examples of affect analyzed in the corpus of this study. The two columns on the right present information about the variables of realization – the lexico-grammatical form – and category – attitudinal sub-type – of each example.

Instances of the four categories of affect .

All the examples presented on this and other tables and figures are instances of evaluative language analyzed in the corpus of this research, except for *, which has been adapted from Martin and White (2005 : 46).

Resources from the judgement and appreciation sub-systems are the result of the modelling and sophistication of affectivity according to social norms and aesthetic parameters produced by social conventions, hence their status as institutionalizations of affect . These institutionalizations represent moral/ethic judgements about people, their actions, and the consequences of their actions, as well as personal considerations about the aesthetic properties of things, processes, and people. Following Martin and White’s (2005) description, expressions of judgement are classified into the categories of +/− normality (how special or unique someone is), +/− capacity (how able a person is), +/− tenacity (how resolute someone is), +/− veracity (related to people’s honesty) and +/− propriety (linked to people’s integrity). Judgement is typically realized through qualities and modal adjuncts ( Table 2 ).

Instances of the five categories of judgement.

Expressions of appreciation encode aesthetic evaluations of speakers in terms of three categories: +/− reaction (emotional responses provoked by things and processes), +/− composition (perceptions of the balance, regularity, and order of things), and +/− valuation (opinions about the aesthetic and practical value of things). Prototypical realizations of appreciation take the form of qualities and circumstances ( Table 3 ).

Instances of the three categories of appreciation.

The examples of attitude presented up to this point correspond to inscribed realizations; expressions that encode attitude overtly or explicitly. Affect , judgement , and appreciation can also be indirectly invoked . The particularity of invoked realizations of attitude is that they demand a special effort from the audience or interlocutor to identify and process the type of evaluation the speaker is doing. Another peculiarity of this type of realization is that it involves the selection of resources pertaining to the ideational metafunction, which “gives structure to experience, and helps to determine our way of looking at things, so that it requires some intellectual effort to see them in any other way than that which our language suggests to us” ( Halliday 2002 : 175). Hence observations by Hood and Martin (2005) and Hood (2010) of processes and participants as efficient attitudinal invokers: ideational meanings are seldom neutral, and speakers choose non-inherently evaluative resources for their invoking potential.

attitude is prototypically invoked through lexical metaphors, processes, nominal participants, and nominalizations of processes and qualities. A notorious exception to these invoked realizations is the case of affect , which can be inscribed through mental and behavioral processes. Table 4 illustrates invoked realizations of attitude analyzed in the corpus of this work.

Invoked realizations of attitude.

An additional remark on attitudinal invocation relates to potential double coding ( Martin and White 2005 ) resulting from indirect realizations of attitude where a given evaluation from one category may be invoked by means of the inscription of another category as in (1) below. In this example, the author expresses a negative evaluation of a reviewer’s knowledge ( appreciation > −composition), which indirectly realizes a negative evaluation about his abilities as a literary analyst ( judgement > −capacity). The possibility of finding such types of invoked realizations in discourse represents the need to make methodological decisions regarding the labelling of attitudinal realizations in an analysis, as was the case in this work. Pertinent observations are made later in the Section 4 .

For the purposes of this research, additionally to the variables of realization, category and explicitness, the variable of trigger is particularly relevant. This variable indicates the stimulus that motivates an evaluation. For the nature of the essays studied in this work – i.e., essays on literary works from English Literature – triggers of attitude were related to characters, other components of the literary works commented by the authors of the corpus (atmosphere, style, plot, etc.), and entities external to the literary works about which they write in their essays (literary concepts, periods, genres, currents, other works, different authors, etc.). Table 5 illustrates instantiations of attitude with labels of their realization, category, explicitness, and trigger.

Instantiations of attitude with realization variables.

3 Research on attitudinal meanings in undergraduate EFL academic writing

The study of the linguistic expression of attitude and its relationship with successful EFL academic writing has received considerable attention in international contexts. Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) analyzed a corpus of argumentative essays written by postgraduate Kurdish-speaking Iranian students of TEFL to explore whether appraisal resources can be used as a reference to evaluate argumentative writing in low- and high-graded essays. These authors found that higher proportions of attitude were characteristic of more successful texts, although both groups of texts were similar in a tendency to use more judgement and appreciation than affect . Additionally, high-graded essays displayed significantly more invoked affect through nominalizations and more inscribed valuation than low-graded texts, which tended to inscribe affect through mental processes and to invoke valuation . In terms of judgement , the main contrast between both sub-corpora lied in the selection of sub-categories, with high-graded essays mainly displaying resources of capacity and low-graded texts mainly instantiating normality . Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) conclude that, although clear tendencies showed that more successful essays tend to display more attitude , punctual instantiations suggested that “in assessing the essays as high- or low-graded, more important than the number of appraisal markers exploited in essays was how these resources were employed” (p. 75). This conclusion coincides with observations by Hunston (2011) , Hunston and Su (2019) , and Valerdi (2021) , who have pointed at the centrality of lexico-grammatical patterns and the strategic use of evaluative language in argumentative structures over low or high proportions of appraisal resources in texts.

Reaching similar conclusions, Myskow and Ono (2018) studied how Japanese undergraduate students of Law and Political Science used resources of affect, judgement and appreciation as part of their arguments’ justifying evidence in a corpus of 62 biographical essays. Having rated the texts as either high or low on the basis of a self-designed rubric, these authors found that both low- and high-rated essays displayed similar proportions of general attitudinal appraisal , with judgement as the most prevalent type of evaluation. Here, the relevant contrasts took place in terms of the most frequently used sub-systems in each group of texts, with high-rated essays displaying higher proportions of appreciation and judgement , and low-rated texts displaying more resources of affect . Additionally, for these researchers, what students found challenging was not the selection of particular attitudinal categories, but finding appropriate grammatical constructions for them to support their arguments; they noticed students relied heavily on attributes to inscribe conclusive evaluations about people. Myskow and Ono (2018) suggest writing teachers should not encourage learners to adopt critical perspectives through heavily polarized inscriptions, but to integrate evaluations with evidence in support of their conclusions through particular grammatical constructions.

In a work that explores the relationship between undergraduate students’ lack of critical voice and limitations in the management of evaluative language, Lee (2015) compared high- and low-graded persuasive essays written by native (Australian) and non-native (South Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese) undergraduate EAP students to identify how evaluative language contributes to academic writing success. In that study, native and non-native writers deployed judgement and appreciation ten times more frequently than affect . When focusing on appreciation resources, the author found that valuation was predominantly more used over expressions of composition and reaction , which they interpretated as a subject-specific particularity. When contrasting low- and high-graded essays, Lee found that less successful texts displayed affect-related reaction twelve times more frequently than successful essays. Additionally, she found that high-graded essays by both native and non-native writers displayed similar tendencies, with frequent use of judgement -invoking valuations . In 2008, Lee had reported very similar tendencies in a study based on a remarkably similar corpus, with high-graded essays deploying significantly more varied attitudinal resources – mainly invoked evaluations of judgment – and depersonalized attitude – in the form of nominalizations – than low-graded texts. For Lee (2015) , shaping an appropriate use of evaluative language is key in EAP instruction, where “students’ exposure to the appraisal system helps them to acquire the relevant English Language skills including grammar and vocabulary most effectively in a context-appropriate manner” (p. 73).

In a work which supports Lee’s (2015) position, Bahmani et al. (2021) propose the model of appraisal as a pedagogical tool to help EAP writers show their critical stance in their texts. To support their claim, the authors developed an experimental study at an Iranian university, comparing the writing successfulness of an experimental group of 30 postgraduate students of English Language Teaching to that of a control group with the same number of students. The experimental group received writing instruction with explicit explanations and analyses of attitude and graduation . On the basis of standardized pre-tests and post-tests applied to both groups, Bahmani et al. concluded that explicit instruction on the use of evaluative language enabled the experimental group to perform more successfully in contrast with the control group, which did not improve its performance significantly.

Besides research based on appraisal analysis, the role of attitudes in academic writing in EFL has seen remarkable contributions developed through applications of Hyland’s (2005) metadiscourse model. Despite general differences between metadiscourse and appraisal , both models have been found to share remarkable similarities in their conceptualization of linguistic attitudes (Du et al. 2023) : linguistic resources that “indicate the writer’s affective […] attitude to propositions” via markers of surprise, agreement, frustration, importance, etc. ( Hyland 2005 : 53). In this paper, key metadiscourse works are worth mentioning for their special focus on contrasting less or more effective texts on the basis of their attitudinal features.

One of such works is that by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) , who support the idea that successful attitudinal conventions can stem from instruction in academic writing. They explored how explicit instruction on the use of attitudinal metadiscourse affects the development of stance features in essays and reports. The authors investigated the development of attitude markers and other metadiscoursal resources during one semester of EAP instruction to undergraduate students from various disciplines in Hong Kong. After analyzing written samples before, during, and after explicit instruction, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) found that undergraduate authors had reduced their use of attitudinal markers significantly in their texts. Additionally, when they graded the same written samples, they found that interpersonal features developed through instruction were more likely to have a positive impact on evaluators. For these authors, “the ability to express a relevant and plausible stance is a crucial indicator of writing quality and development” (p. 94). As challenging as this has been proved to be, such ability can be trained in undergraduate students, who enter university writing privileging their attitudes about their claims and their positions, but may be instructed to develop a new academic voice, “gaining control over the rhetorical and linguistic aspects of academic discourse via the use of a more careful, narrower, less polarising and less personal range of expressions with which to convey their attitudes on a given topic” (p. 102).

Lee and Deakin (2016) looked more closely at the role of attitudinal metadiscourse markers in the effectiveness of undergraduate writing in EFL by analyzing essays written by Chinese learners enrolled in their first or second writing course at a university in the United States. The essays had been rated through a standardized grading rubric either as low or high. Lee and Deakin (2016) found that authors of successful essays had a tendency to include significantly more attitudinal markers than less successful essays. Additionally, these authors observed that attitudinal resources in high-rated texts displayed more varied lexico-grammatical realizations. In these authors’ corpus, the expression of authorial stance through attitude seems to be an important factor of success. Nevertheless, compared to other types of stance markers – namely hedges, boosters, self-mention, and engagement markers –, they observe that attitudinal resources are among the least used expressions of interpersonal meanings in both low- and high-rated essays. These findings can be related to those by Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) in that not only do linguistic realizations of attitude seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English, but they also appear to stem from effective instruction that results in the acquisition of rhetorical conventions of academic EFL writing. Adhering to or neglecting such conventions affects the impression of (in)effectiveness of undergraduate academic texts.

These works have explored and confirmed, to varying degrees and from interrelated perspectives, the possibility to link the use of evaluative attitudinal language to effectiveness in academic EFL writing in different international contexts. The following section presents a description of the methodological approach that was applied in this research in order to explore such relationship in the Mexican context. This will be followed by a report of the results obtained.

4 Methodology

The purpose of this paper is to analyze realizations of attitude in undergraduate academic essays in EFL in order to determine if their attitudinal features represent a potential source of text (in)effectiveness beyond lexicogrammatical and structural considerations. This is done through a mixed qualitative and quantitative methodology, comparing the deployment of resources from the three attitude sub-systems in essays written by Mexican undergraduate students from different instructional levels of the major on English Language and Literature at a public university in Central Mexico.

The major in English Language and Literature consists of eight consecutive semesters. Students entering the first semester must provide evidence of having completed three years of EFL instruction during their high school studies. Additionally, they must pass an exam that determines whether they possess competencies equivalent to band B2 from the Common European Framework. As part of their studies in the major, they study four 16-week language courses during the first four semesters (one course per semester). From the fifth to the eight semesters, their training in the language takes place through specialized content subjects that are taught in English. These subjects include advanced English Literature courses where essay writing is a regular instructional and evaluative practice.

4.1 The corpus

The corpus of this work includes 41 essays that were written as final assignments in 16-week English Literature courses by students from different instructional levels: it comprises 15 essays written by students from 1st through 3rd semester – labeled as ‘basic’–, 15 essays from 4th through 6th semester – classified as ‘intermediate’ –, and 11 essays from 7th through 8th semester – considered as ‘advanced’ –. The texts were written under the general instruction to analyze one of the literary works studied during one semester, identify its most remarkable literary features, and justify observations about the chosen work. Each essay was evaluated by the teacher of the English Literature course where it was collected and was granted a grade from 5 to 10. During the recollection of the corpus, teachers in charge of the courses reported to have evaluated the essays on the basis of appropriate analysis of literary concepts and features, as well as cohesion, coherence, and grammatical accuracy. No standardized or specially-designed rubric was used, so the results of evaluation resulted from the expert view of teachers according to the academic liberty policy of the university.

For the purposes of this study, the texts were further divided into three sub-categories according to the grade they were granted by course teachers: low-graded (essays with notes from 5 to 6), middle-graded (notes from 7 to 8), and high-graded (notes from 9 to 10). Table 6 illustrates the composition and distribution of the corpus.

Composition and distribution of the corpus and sub-corpora.

4.2 The analysis

All realizations of attitude in the corpus were recorded and analyzed taking into account the variables of category, realization, explicitness, and trigger. For the trigger variable, five subject-specific labels were established due to the nature of the analyzed discourse: Author 1 (A1) is marked when the writer evaluates him or herself; Author 2 (A2), when the writer evaluates the author of the literary work he or she discusses in the essay; Character (CH), when the evaluated entity is a character or narrator from the literary work discussed in the essay; Text (TXT), when the writer evaluates elements of the literary work he or she analyzes in the essay, such as atmosphere, style, plot, etc.; and Other (OTH), when the evaluated entity is external to the literary work under analysis, such as literary periods, genres, other works, different authors, etc. Additionally, the authorship of attitudinal evaluation was identified through the variable of appraiser ( Martin and White 2005 ). This variable distinguishes between authorial (the writer is the one who evaluates attitudinally) and non-authorial (the writer attributes an attitudinal evaluation to someone else) realizations of attitude .

Besides tracking attitude types in the corpus, the purpose of observing all these realizational variables was to avoid misleading recordings due to potential double coding – i.e., invoked realizations of one attitudinal category instantiated by inscribed realizations of a different one. Because a delicate analysis of this type of invoked attitude is beyond the scope and purpose of this work, when examples of this were identified in the corpus, the inscribed interpretations were considered for the analysis on the basis of prototypical realizations and variables described earlier in Section 2 .

Table 7 illustrates attitudinal instantiations from the corpus with the labels of all the variables observed, including an instance of invoked judgement which was recorded as inscribed appreciation (**). In this example, inscribed appreciation ( +valuation ) is used to evaluate human +veracity indirectly.

Instantiations of attitude with labels of five realizational variables.

All instances of attitude were recorded and quantified in dynamic tables. Proportions of expression of each type of attitude were calculated by dividing the number of occurrences of each attitudinal paradigm by the total number of clauses in each text and sub-corpus (# of attitude instantiations/# of clauses). When focus was on attitude sub-types and realizational variables, proportions were calculated by dividing the number of the corresponding attitudinal paradigm by the total number of attitude instantiations in each text and sub-corpus. As in previous work on appraisal ( Lee 2008 ; Mei 2007 ; Valerdi 2016 ), Chi-squared tests were performed in order to confirm the statistical significance of the findings. This type of test is used to “examine the distribution of data across the categories of our analysis” and “the extent to which the distribution of your observed data varies from the distribution that would be expected if the independent variable had no effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 78). The students’ instructional level (basic, intermediate, and advanced) and perceived effectiveness (low, middle, and high) are independent variables in this study while the expression of attitude and its variables are dependent variables.

In linguistic studies involving categorical dependent variables, chi-square tests with a resulting p value of <0.05 indicate there is a relationship between the variables ( Rasinger 2013 ). In other words, such tests “tell you that there is at least a 95 % chance that the independent variable does in fact have an effect on the dependent variable” ( Levon 2010 : 81). The following section presents the results of the study and indicate p values obtained by the chi-square tests.

5.1 Attitude in the general corpus and by instructional level

As a general feature, there is a significantly reduced proportion of evaluative language in the whole corpus, with only 18.02 % of the clauses expressing attitude. This is reflected in each of the instructional level sub-corpora: 19 % in basic essays, 16 % in intermediate essays, and 20 % in advanced essays. Additionally, these sub-corpora display appreciation as the most recurrent type of attitudinal positioning, while affect is the least frequent attitudinal paradigm in the corpus. The proportions of the different types of attitude are statistically significant in all the instructional levels of the texts ( Table 8 ).

Proportions of realization per attitude sub-system by instructional level.

a When a p value is too long to be contained in a single cell, Excel, the program used for quantitative explorations in this work, reports the result with the suffix ‘E’ followed by an entire number. Such coding means that, for an exact reading of the p value, the decimal point in the result must be moved as many places to the left as indicated by the number following ‘E’. In this case, the value of p is statistically significant, as the full result (0.0000000000000000108249) is meaningfully bellow conventional 0.05.

When considering the variable of explicitness, the corpus features a progressive reduction of evaluative inscription, which is predominant in basic essays and reduces by 21 % in advanced texts ( Table 9 ). The differences in explicitness among the sub-corpora are highly statistically significant.

Proportions of inscribed and invoked attitude by instructional level.

Further careful analysis of the explicitness variable reveals that evaluations of affect and appreciation are mainly inscribed in the three groups of texts while resources of judgement tend to be invoked ( Table 10 ). This corresponds directly to the most representative lexical realizations of attitude in the corpus: attributes, epithets, and mental processes for affect; attributes and epithets for appreciation; and processes, nouns and nominalizations for judgement. The proportions of explicitness were found statistically significant for judgement and appreciation only.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types by instructional level. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Regarding the realizational variable of triggers, authors of intermediate and advanced essays have literary characters, literary features, and external entities related to the works they analyze in their essays as stimuli for evaluative expressions, in that order of saliency and in almost identical proportions. Writers of basic essays, on the other hand, focus primarily on the authors of the works they discuss when positioning themselves attitudinally, but coincide with their intermediate and advanced counterparts in focusing on literary features of their analyzed works secondly, and thirdly on external entities ( Table 11 ).

Triggers of attitudinal evaluations by instructional level. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

5.2 Attitude by perceived effectiveness

The corpus displays meaningful contrasts in the evaluative features of the essays when their perceived effectiveness is taken into consideration. In Table 12 , we can see there is an increasing presence of attitudinal evaluation that progresses from low-graded to middle-graded essays in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Such progression, however, does not continue in essays from the advanced sub-corpus, where the distribution of attitudinal realizations contrasts with the other texts and was found to be not statistically significant.

Proportions of attitude in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

A ppreciation resources are the most recurrent attitude type in all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays, followed by judgement and, in much lower proportions, by affect . Additionally, as illustrated in Table 13 , proportions of judgement and affect are close in representativeness to each other in all groups of texts, which indicates an interesting regularity related to the degree of effectiveness attributed to the essays by university teachers.

Proportions of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers.

The explicitness variable does not seem to affect the tendencies in the corpus when related to perceived effectiveness ( Table 14 ). Inscribed appreciation and invoked judgement are the most representative choices in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. Realizations of affect are significantly inscribed with two exceptions to this tendency. First, intermediate middle-graded essays display invoked affect over inscribed realizations by a difference of 20 %. Secondly, advanced low-graded essays are radically different from middle- and high-graded texts from the same instructional level with 100 % of affective realizations being invoked. Despite the clarity of these tendencies, differences in explicitness were not found statistically significant in relation to perceived effectiveness.

Proportions of invocation and inscription of attitude types in relation to grades granted by university teachers. Predominant tendencies are highlighted.

Table 15 shows remarkable regularities in the types of triggers that undergraduate writers of two sub-corpora have in mind when expressing attitudinal evaluation of different types. In the intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, all low-, middle-, and high-graded essays display evaluative focus on characters, textual literary features, external elements, the authors of their analyzed works, and the very authors of the essays, in that order of predominance. Interestingly, essays from the basic instructional level differ in every single proportion of trigger choice from the others, with textual literary features as the main attitudinal trigger in all low-, middle, and high-graded essays. The second most representative triggers in low- and middle-graded essays are external elements and characters, respectively, while high-graded essays prioritize authors of their analyzed woks. Finally, low- and middle-graded texts coincide in privileging the attitudinal evaluation of the authors of the works they study in the third place. High-graded essays, on the other hand, prioritize their attitudinal stance regarding elements external to their analyzed literary works. These results were found to be highly statistically significant for the basic essays of the corpus, slightly non-significant for the intermediate texts, and markedly non-significant for advanced essays.

Triggers of attitudinal evaluation in all sub-corpora in relation to grades granted by university teachers. The three most representative types of triggers in each sub-corpus are highlighted.

6 Discussion

The results of this research show a meaningful relationship between the use of attitudinal evaluation in undergraduate academic EFL writing and the production of effective texts in the context of the analyzed corpus. In this section, this is shown by discussing the results from general to particular starting with a global scenario of the corpus, then looking at attitudinal features of the texts according to their instructional levels, and finally discussing attitude in relation to the essays’ perceived effectiveness. Following this order, it will be easier to relate the findings to attitudinal features in general undergraduate academic writing and then observe specific features where perceived effectiveness in the texts plays a distinctive role in the corpus of this work.

6.1 Attitude in the general corpus

The first relevant observation is the reduced presence of expressions of attitude in the global corpus, which is a general regularity that previous studies from various contexts have found as a significant feature of academic writing. The low occurrence of attitudinal evaluations in this sort of discourse can be understood in terms of argumentative pertinence. As Hunston states ( 1999 ), in academic discourse, only certain things get linguistically evaluated and they do it in specific ways when it is worth it. Additionally, looking back at Petty and Cacioppo’s (1986) observations on the effects of subjective language in discourse, the appeal to the affective responses of an audience usually takes place at strategic points where an objective argumentation may lack the necessary persuasive potential. Thus, in discourses where objectivity is highly appreciated, attitudinal evaluations are used in limited proportions and forms, leading to a strategic management of evaluative resources.

Such strategic nature in the use of attitudinal evaluations has been previously explored in academic discourse in Spanish and in EFL academic writing. Valerdi (2021) found that attitude resources occurred in limited proportions due to their usefulness in certain specific types of argument components in postgraduate academic discourses in Spanish. The corpus of this study seems to conform to this strategic management of attitudinal expression. Within the area of EFL academic writing, Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) concluded that particular dynamics of attitudinal deployment in texts are more determinant than large global amounts of attitudinal language in texts. In line with this, Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) concluded that effective writing displays limited and careful expression of attitudinal meanings. Considering these antecedents, the general features of evaluative expressions in the corpus of this work seem to respond to academic writing conventions that learners have associated to their use of their target language and, in turn, reflect a general tendency that has been identified as a feature of effective writing in academic contexts.

6.1.1 Attitude types

A second feature the corpus shares with general effective writing is the predominance of realizations of appreciation in more than 50 % of evaluative resources. Such predominance prevails when breaking the corpus into smaller sub-corpora of basic, intermediate and advanced instructional levels. This leaves little room for affective evaluations, which occur in no more than 9 % of attitudinal realizations in all sub-corpora. As mentioned before, only certain things are evaluated in academic texts, and they are in certain ways only. This is confirmed when comparing these findings with those of previous works on appraisal in different contexts. Zhang and Cheung (2018) , for instance, found appreciation as the most realized type of attitude in articles on Second Language Writing, which they see as the result of a strategic evaluation which focuses on the value of things in order to objectify observations that are subjective in nature. Lee (2015) observes similar tendencies in undergraduate essays and emphasizes the importance of evaluating things related to the subject matter in the production of academic texts. According to these interpretations, prioritizing the appraisal of discipline-related things is central in academic arguments, where evaluation tends to be more objective than it would were it based on observations about human behavior or emotional responses of writers.

6.1.2 Attitudinal explicitness

The inscription and invocation of attitudinal meanings display one more regularity of the corpus that remains constant in the basic, intermediate, and advanced sub-corpora. From a general perspective, attitudinal evaluations are predominantly inscribed, making their attitudinal stance accessible in terms of the effort their identification and interpretation demand from the reader ( Halliday 2002 ). Nonetheless, such inscribing tendency changes when looking at each attitudinal category; realizations of judgement tend to be invoked in more than 65 % of occurrences.

These features carry interesting implications in terms of the degrees of explicitness with which EFL academic undergraduate authors deploy their evaluations. First, the global tendency to inscribe evaluations coincides with Hood and Martin’s (2005) observation that academic writers do not usually invoke attitude when constructing arguments around their work. The features of the corpus of this work confirm the validity of that observation in EFL academic writing. Regarding the contrasting realizations of judgement , previous research has shown how evaluations focused on people and their behavior tend to be managed more carefully in academic contexts than those triggered by things, taking the form of invoked attitudinal resources ( Hood and Martin 2005 ; Valerdi 2016 ). Apparently, the authors of the corpus behave more freely or confidently when evaluating things related to the subject matter of their work and their own personal impressions through appreciation and affect than when dealing with human – or humanized – triggers, in which case they tend to proceed more cautiously. It seems plausible to say these features correspond to generally effective evaluative dynamics in academic writing. Even though proportional differences between inscribed and invoked affect are not statistically significant ( Table 10 ), the regularity of their plain contrast and the significance of differences in judgement and appreciation stand as a remarkable feature of the corpus.

6.1.3 Triggers of attitudinal evaluation

The tendencies of the most recurrent triggers of attitudinal evaluation in the corpus are another area of significant regularity across instructional levels. The vast majority of attitude realizations is triggered by elements inherently associated to the literary works the authors analyzed in their essays; in the overall corpus, the most recurrent triggers are literary characters, followed by textual features from the realm of literary studies, and entities and concepts external to literary works in second and third place, respectively. These results seem to be a direct consequence of the instructions authors were given to analyze a literary work by identifying its most remarkable features as instances of literary genres and to justify their observations. Here, the notion of justification is key; since the authors were expected to justify their observations about literary features, it would seem natural to expect arguments founded on argumentative conclusions and supporting ideas focused on such things as characters, textual features and the contexts around literary works. Such was the case of the corpus of academic essays analyzed by Myskow and Ono (2018) , who found that attitudinal resources were used as part of the two central components of arguments, namely conclusions and supporting ideas, connected to subject matter-related triggers. Taking into consideration Myskow and Ono’s experience, together with Valerdi (2016) findings on the realizations of attitudinal evaluations directly connected to specific argument components, the statistically significant features of the triggers variable in this corpus confirm the centrality of attitudinal evaluation on the elaboration of academic arguments.

6.2 Attitude by instructional level

The corpus displays significant variations if the results are seen from the perspective of the three levels of instruction of the authors of the texts. There is a clear tendency for uses of affect and appreciation to decrease progressively from basic through advanced essays, while realizations of judgement increase from 13 % to 40 % ( Table 8 ). This could be interpreted as the direct consequence of the authors’ choice to evaluate characters from the works they studied and, as a result, it further supports the strategic nature of evaluative choices in the corpus; if any type of attitude was to remain present at different instructional levels, it was the one triggered by human-like entities. Additionally, despite the general reduction of inscribed evaluations in all three sub-corpora ( Table 9 ), expressions of judgement developed on the opposite direction, reducing their invoked realizations significantly ( Table 10 ). These observations suggest interesting evaluative dynamics on the corpus; while there is a general caution on the part of authors to evaluate human and human-like entities in their texts, there also seems to be certain development of a notion of discursive authority ( Poynton 1985 , as cited in Valerdi 2016 ) allowing writers to express their stance regarding human triggers in more open terms through inscribed judgmental evaluations as they gain more linguistic and disciplinary experience.

The relationship between evaluative language and disciplinary experience can also be seen in the triggers on which authors focus their attitude realizations. Writers of basic essays contrast with writers of intermediate and advanced texts in their evaluative focus on authors of literary works as the third most relevant triggers ( Table 11 ). Clearly, the interpretation of writers of basic essays regarding what elements are central in literary analysis is particular. Considering previous observations about the relevance of prioritizing arguments around the value of things to objectify evaluations ( Zhang and Cheung 2018 ), it seems plausible to conclude that, in intermediate and advanced texts, the less central consideration of human elements different from literary characters is the result of the development of a more specialized selection of elements worthy of literary discussion. These findings further support what has been observed by Candarli et al. (2015) , Lee and Deakin (2016) and Crosthwaite and Jiang (2017) ; attitudinal choices seem to be modulated by EFL writers when writing in English and, in parallel with this, they stem from disciplinary instruction which leads to the acquisition of academic EFL writing rhetorical conventions. On the grounds of these observations, it is clear how previously discussed general features of effective writing develop in the corpus as essays progress towards more experienced writing.

6.3 Attitude in relation to perceived effectiveness

The results of the analysis evidence a tendency in high-graded essays to display significantly greater proportions of attitude than texts graded as low and middle ( Table 12 ). The fact that the advanced sub-corpus displays an irregular distribution – with middle-graded essays presenting the most attitude – could be explained by the acquisition of more regularly applied conventions by advanced writers resulting in closer proportions between these groups of texts. Further explorations of advanced essays in this and similar contexts are needed to confirm this. Still, even though the p value of 0.11234221 indicates results might be different for this sub-corpus if this research were replicated, in the actuality of these results low-graded essays display the least instances of attitudinal evaluation.

It is remarkable to notice the significant predominance of appreciation over judgement and affect stands when effectiveness is considered. This indicates the development of attitude -related interpersonal conventions along basic, intermediate, and advanced instructional levels has been shaped by pedagogical dynamics that favor the observed tendencies via both instruction and academic evaluation: what teachers disseminate and evaluate as effective motivates what learners use to shape their discourse in this type of writing as they move towards more specialized levels of literary analysis. It is worth remembering that, according to what they reported, teachers who assessed the essays did not consider attitudinal expressions in their evaluation criteria. Then, in line with Lee’s analysis (2008), we can conclude that teachers might have perceived the management of evaluative language, which directly relates to writers’ stance and voice, as part of the appropriate analysis of literary components and features they sought; attitude is central to effectiveness in the corpus of this work.

Similar findings in previous research indicate the latter interpretation may also apply to other contexts; Jalilifar and Hemmati (2013) found successful EFL texts by Iranian writers displayed significantly more frequent instances of appreciation than judgement and affect , just as Myskow and Ono (2018) did in their essays by Japanese students. Moreover, similarly to this research, patterns of attitudinal inscription and invocation in the corpora analyzed by those authors can be significantly related to degrees of (in)effectiveness. In the corpus of this work, inscription of affect and appreciation contrasts with invocation of judgement in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays – save for minor variations in affect , the least representative category, in the basic and intermediate sub-corpora. Although these contrasts may require further exploration to confirm statistical significance, their plain tendencies and their consistency with the significant dynamics by instructional level confirm the role of attitudinal meanings in the shaping of undergraduate writers’ positioning and, most importantly, a positive relationship between realizations of attitude and the effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

Such relationship is further evidenced by the development of attitudinal triggers selection patterns. As it was previously described, in both intermediate and advanced essays, characters, textual features and external literary elements are the most representative triggers in low-, middle-, and high-graded essays. In the basic sub-corpus, however, the very authors of the essays figure as either the second (low- and middle-graded texts) or first (high-graded-texts) choices. The contrast this represents can be explained, once more, on the basis of instruction and academic evaluation; although attitudinal stance focused on the very authors of the essays conflicts with the general features of the corpus, the fact that the other two main trigger types in basic essays remain within what can be seen as disciplinarily central in the general scenario may have allowed for certain tolerance on the part of teachers. Although having access to feedback received by the writers of the basic essays would be the only way to confirm this, it should be enough to notice that trigger selection in relation to text effectiveness takes a clear orientation in the rest of the corpus, thus corroborating the role of attitudinal evaluations in undergraduate academic writing instantiated by the corpus.

In the light of these results, a positive relationship between the expression of attitudinal meanings and academic texts (in)effectiveness has been confirmed. What is more, the writing conventions followed by the authors of the corpus of this work suggest that attitudinal features privileged by university teachers in basic levels of instruction determine the conventions adopted in effective texts at more advanced levels, even when attitudinal dynamics do not seem to have been explicitly prioritized. Apparently, attitudinal dynamics in the context of the corpus have developed from complex influences which go beyond mere linguistic and disciplinary instruction. These observations relate to Chitez and Kruse’s (2012) considerations about writing cultures: further extra disciplinary features related to writing cultures shape what could be considered as effective or successful in writing academically. These include learners’ class experience before and during university education, contact with diverse curricular arrangements, university-specific organizational structures, national writing cultures, and differences among languages. As evidenced by the findings of this work, these factors represent important aspects to consider in the design of academic writing programs and discipline-specific writing courses as these may have to take into consideration the features of their participants’ target audiences, including potential expectations determined by their own linguistic, cultural, and even institutional backgrounds.

All these considerations have a particular centrality in programs focused on training future professionals in English Language and Literature for, as it has been shown, even when interpersonal dynamics involving attitude conform to similar general tendencies in the whole corpus of this study, they vary significantly at more delicate degrees of analysis such as instructional levels and realizational variables. Additionally, exploring such delicacy in variation, which can only be done by analyzing the academic discourse of speakers from different instructional levels within the same undergraduate community, may also serve as a valuable source of information for pedagogical actions aiming to guide undergraduate writers in the production of effective texts in other disciplines.

7 Conclusions

As the findings of this work have shown, the construction of interpersonal relationships through the use of linguistic resources of attitude plays an important role in the perceived effectiveness of undergraduate EFL academic writing at different levels of experience and disciplinary instruction, which indicates the importance of broadening assessment criteria of academic writing beyond the constraints of lexicogrammatical accuracy and text structure, as well as pertinent observations about attitudinal positioning in instructional processes, in favor of deeper interpersonal metalinguistic awareness in both students and writing instructors. In order to face these instructional challenges, it is important to emphasize the results also show that the influence of attitudinal language in the (in)effectiveness of academic texts is furtherly determined by a complex series of contextual factors including discursive authority, writing experience, discipline-specific focus objects, and the multi-faceted writing-related cultural background of writers.

These conclusions are supported by six main findings that have been reported in this paper: 1) In adherence to general academic writing, the corpus displays a significantly low occurrence of attitude resources, which results from a strategic deployment of interpersonal resources by writers as to what is evaluated in their texts and in what ways; 2) General attitudinal features in the corpus privilege appreciation as the most frequent type of attitude and position affect as the least deployed evaluative resource, which reflects the writers’ prioritizing of evaluations of discipline-related things to project an objective-like positioning; 3) Realizations of judgement throughout the corpus are mainly invoked, signaling the adoption of particular evaluation strategies around human or human-like triggers; 4) Basic essays feature greater use of attitudinal resources than intermediate and advanced essays, suggesting a progressive development of objective-like writing dynamics; 5) Overall, high-graded essays display more frequent expressions of attitude than middle- and low-graded essays, suggesting that the expression of attitude is not simply reduced in learners’ discourse as they move forward in their academic training, but according to conventions that favor certain types of strategic attitudinal positioning in texts; 6) In general, the realizational variables of attitude category, explicitness and trigger selection show significantly matching tendencies in high-graded essays in the basic, intermediate and advanced sub-corpora, confirming the central role of the strategic use of affect , judgement and appreciation resources in terms of their realizational variables in the production of effective texts, even when writing conventions develop towards reduced proportions of attitude . Those findings which were not found to be statistically significant might need further exploration, perhaps on the basis of a larger corpus, in order to refine their implications from a statistical perspective. Still, it is worth remembering statistical interpretations, either descriptive or inferential, always leave room for open possibilities.

Regarding the latter point, interpretations of the reported results need to take into consideration that a relevant limitation of this study is the size of its corpus. Although the results of the analysis demonstrate consistent and mostly statistically significant features, their full implications apply to the context of the academic community where the essays were collected. In order to obtain more generalizable findings with more predictive potential in relation to the Mexican context, future work might need to replicate the study on the basis of a larger and more varied corpus.

While the scope of the results of this work is limited to the boundaries of the context of this research, the implications of its findings represent meaningful contributions that complement previous research on the workings of appraisal resources of attitude in EFL academic writing. Most importantly, this work contributes to further understanding of the workings of evaluative language in academic instruction in the context of Mexico, where pedagogical developments from the systemic functional perspective of appraisal theory are still in their early stages. It is ideal that the focus of future work seek to implement research findings in the development of concrete instructional tools which improve the scenario of effective interpersonal positioning for undergraduate authors seeking to take part in international disciplinary dialogue through academic English.

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Powerful Academic Phrases to Improve Your Essay Writing

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In writing an academic essay, arguments and ideas need to be built and articulated in a compelling manner. These should be supported with appropriate evidence. Furthermore, verifiable facts and examples must be presented in an engaging way and the entire essay should be well structured.

In all these, the usage of right academic phrases becomes helpful. Depending on what you want to convey, different academic phrases can be used in various situations as discussed below.

Very often in essays you may have to engage in the process of comparing and contrasting information, key aspects of two phenomena taken for study, or various sources for your literature review and so on. You will have to bring in to your discussion not just the similarities to your arguments, but also opposing or conflicting perspectives.

Use of appropriate phrases will help organically bring in such similar or contrasting information. For example, some of the phrases that can be used to discuss similarities and differences include: In comparison or by contrast, however, conversely, alternatively, whereas, on the other hand, likewise, in the same way and so on. Example: “The author expresses his opinion based on anecdotal references. By contrast the survey he quotes and tries to argue against is more plausible with the rigorous data it has collected.”

While writing an academic essay, you are required to support and expand your ideas and arguments through the use of examples. Phrases that can be used to provide examples include: for example, for instance, to illustrate, to exemplify, to demonstrate.

Example: “Climate and weather patterns are changing rapidly and its ramifications are staring us in the face. For example, look at what is happening with the incessant rains pouring down during certain summer months.”

As you structure your narrative, you will have to elaborate at various points on the information, ideas, and arguments that you are presenting. This has to be done in a manner that does not adversely affect the smooth flow of the narrative. It is here that the usage of appropriate phrases is crucial to uplift the quality of your essay. Using phrases such as moreover, furthermore, in other words, in addition and so on can aid in providing additional information.

Example: “Rising temperatures are greatly impacting the health of children belonging to vulnerable groups in parts of the Asian sub-continent. Moreover, the lack of adequate government support and dismal welfare measures is making lives harder for such families.”

While writing research papers or essays, researchers often acknowledge the limitations of their studies and the possibilities for conflicting or opposing views. Such recognition is pertinent for the advancement of scientific knowledge. There are various phrases that can be used to indicate uncertainty such as: it could be argued that the data suggest that evidence suggest that, or it is possible due to.

Example: “The evidence suggests that the new teaching methods are beneficial and can be considered as an alternative to existing methods”.

The concluding part of your essay should be a summary of your main ideas and arguments and its significance. To this end, the following phrases can be utilized: to summarise, to conclude, above all, or most significantly.

Example: “To conclude, evidence points to the positive impact of periodic creative workshops on children’s cognitive development.”

While academic writing may be challenging, mastering the use of appropriate academic phrases, avoiding jargon, and delivering clear, concise writing can elevate one’s writing to a higher and contribute to the advancement of knowledge in their respective fields.

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INFLUENCE OF INTERNET SLANGS ON THE ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT OF SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS IN ESSAY WRITING IN ENGLISH LANGUAGE CHAPTER ONE

2019, INTERNET SLANG

The study on the impact of internet slang on the academic achievement of students aimed to determine the relationship between internet slang and academic achievement in secondary schools. The study made use of primary data obtained from research questionnaires. The study used Pearson correlation method for data analysis. The study concluded that there is a significant relationship between internet slang and academic performance.

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academic achievement language essay

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39 Academic Achievement Examples

Academic Achievement Examples

2. Winning a Scholarship

3. Receiving an Academic Award or Prize

4. Leadership in an Academic Club or Society

5. Participation in a Study Abroad Program

6. Tutoring or Mentoring Experience

7. Completion of an Internship or Co-op Position

8. Certifications

Examples for Graduates

23. Earning a Continuing Education Certificate

24. Completion of a Significant Capstone Project

25. Graduation with Honors

26. Completion of a Research Assistant Project

Examples for Postgraduates and Above

28. Research Grant Award

29. Successful Defense of a Doctoral Thesis

30. Acceptance into a Top-Tier Graduate Program

31. Presentation at a Major Conference

32. Appointment to a University Faculty Position

33. Development of a New Course or Curriculum

34. Taking a Role as Course Leader

35. Guest Editing an Academic Journal Edition

36. Citations to Your Publications

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Academic Achievement by Ricarda Steinmayr , Anja Meißner , Anne F. Weidinger , Linda Wirthwein LAST REVIEWED: 30 July 2014 LAST MODIFIED: 30 July 2014 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0108

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Effects of students’ self-reflection on improving essay writing achievement among Ethiopian undergraduate students: a counterbalanced design

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Students’ writing challenges and their achievement

Self-reflection and writing achievement

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Validity and reliability of data collection tools

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Challenges in essay writing achievement

Effects of self-reflection-based instruction on writing achievement

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