Abstract

This is a case study of Emily, an English major who has finished her studies in the three-year extension program at a technical college. She just took the entrance exam to two-year college leading to a BA degree. With high motivation in learning English, she wants to polish her writing skills so that she could do well in her studies in her future academic work. Her affective filter is low and she has an amiable personality to participate in the project.

The teacher-investigator helped her to diagnose her writing problems throughout the whole process. By supervising her to write and revise two essays, it is obvious that Emily needs teachers' scaffolding skills and she could do it much better after using the topic structure analysis (hereafter, TSA) as a tool to diagnose her own writing. In addition to the whole composing process, the teacher-investigator has found that Emily in fact is beginning to like writing and feels proud of her essays.

The case study was conducted and narrated by the teacher-investigator, who held conferences with Emily numerous times and had one-to-one conferencing on improving the essay. Taking data from Emily's notes of her language learning experiences, written records of each writing conference, the investigator's written recollections, as well as informal chatting between Emily and the teacher-investigator, this study reveals how topical structure analysis is situated in the composing processes of a typical intermediate-level Taiwanese student and how she adopted new learning strategies with which she finally learned how to develop coherence through this approach-topical structure analysis.