Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Thank you for the opportunity to review this study.  This study explored the effects of incorporating mind maps as a scaffold to support middle school students' writing in EFL contexts.  Adolescent writing (particularly at the middle school level) is understudied, and this paper has the potential to fill an important gap in the field. The author(s) provided a terrific review of the relevant research.  The study is well-grounded in theory relevant to writing instruction and EFL instruction, and the research questions and hypotheses flow logically from the introduction.  The measures used to quantify writing complexity, accuracy and fluency are well-supported by the literature.  

However, this study's current design makes it challenging to interpret the findings. The use of a pretest-post-test design without the inclusion of a comparison group yields results that are difficult to interpret, as the growth shown in all dimensions can be attributed to differences in the writing prompts, general growth through instruction, peer feedback, or the use of graphic organizers.  

More minor concerns include:

* It would be helpful to have a little more information about the sample.  How many classrooms and teachers were involved?  What was the class size?

*  It would be helpful to provide the prompts used at pretest and post-test. Are they equivalent and yield similar writing volume and quality in other circumstances? 

*  For accuracy, it's not clear who tallied the errors or the inter-rater reliability of the measure of linguistic accuracy.

* Similarly, for the measure of fluency, it's not clear who the number of transition words was tallied and its reliability.  It appears that this taps cohesion rather than fluency - as that is often operationalized as the total number of words generated in the text.

* For the procedure, it would be helpful to have more information about the peer feedback.  Were students provided a structure or rubric to provide the feedback?

* The bar graphs are redundant with the information in the table.  If they are included, please add error bars.

*  Given the single-group design, is it possible to connect students' graphic organizers with their compositions in some way? Are the other data that could be drawn into this case study?

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thanks! 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

 

Your study presents an interesting perspective on mind-mapping in EFL writing. Here are some comments on a few areas that could help the overall clarity and focused argument. 

Clarity:

The title can be refined. It does contain the main topic but can include more specificity and clarity. Key words should be also double checked.

For the readers, certain terms should be consistently used in the paper. For instance, ESL vs. EFL is differently used in this context. If the second language ‘L2’ is used, this can be more connected to ESL, not EFL. Clear explanation should be added, or the term should be fixed.

Otherwise, the commonality between EFL and ESL/L2 should be added.

One of the key words is adolescent EFL learners; however, no specific results were found regarding different population. “Critical role of writing in academic success” (p.4, line 169) was not described or studied in this research.

The references should be added clearer for Figure 1 (P. 5, Line 190). For example, the page number should be added. Also, the description on Figure 1 is confusing. Should be refined.

Figure 3 should be also checked; a reference should be added. Since the mind mapping is one of the key words, more description can be added.

Organizations:

Table 1 and Table 2 were listed in a row. Each one should be separated with proper explanation and a better organization is recommended.

The final stage of scaffolded writing instruction is not clear (in Table 2). In the page 10 (line 344), teacher’s evaluation only contains comments?

What’s the students’ final data of writing. Is it the revised draft after teacher’s evaluation? Or the final version before submitting to the teacher.

Clearer description is recommended in “measurement of accuracy and fluency” in methods (Line 425 and 439)  

Mixed parts:

The last part in the data analysis in methods should move into the part of results. (p.12, Line 467-470)

Coherence:

Results started with Table 3 abruptly. (Line 471). Revision is recommended.

Discussion  (Missing Points/Arguments):

“Academic development as a critical role of writing” (p.15. Line 513) was not included in this research.

“Higher-order thinking” skills are not dealt in this study. The paper needs to show more connections this to grammatical complexity.  

There are no differences among 4 dimensions. The different results should be shown in the discussion.

“In their arguments” (P.16, Line 569): Is it “in their narrative”?

 

In the discussion, it is a bit confusing if this paper is trying to show the impact of mind-mapping or the impact of scaffolded writing instruction. In the “grammatical complexity” and “fluency”, effects of peer collaboration and teacher’s feedback were emphasized without any data, not mind-mapping. More data can be added such as some samples of students’ writings with peer or teacher’s feedback. This can be moved to implication parts.

Or the connection of mind-mapping and scaffolding instruction should be shown clearer.

Also, one of the key focuses of this paper was adolescent EFL learners. No specific data analysis or findings were described except repeating the importance in the literature review.

 

Conclusions:

This study shows the improvement of writing of EFL students which support the results of previous studies; however, the findings did not show anything distinctive about “adolescent” students or EFL students.

 In conclusions, the term “L2 writing” (p. 18, Line 666 and 669) should be more clearly used or changed into a more proper term for the EFL context as it is more proper in ESL context.

 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment. Thanks! 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf