The purpose of this study is to investigate a method of giving feedback on essay writing in order to focus students' attention on logicality. Students' comments on using the Question Formulation Technique (QFT) for writing an essay need to be analyzed to examine whether students are paying attention to logicality in their essay writing.
The aim of this study is to explore a method of giving feedback on essay writing that focuses students' attention on their logicality by using the Question Formulation Technique (QFT). The meaning of logic includes several interpretations. For example, logicality can be visualized by the Toulmin Model (Toulmin, 1958), which involves three elements: claim, data, and warrant. The claim is the conclusion of the argument, the data are the facts or evidence presented as a foundation for the claim, and the warrant is the bridge or step from the data to the claim (Toulmin, 1958). In this study, paying attention to logicality means paying attention to those three elements. According to the section on foreign languages in the New Course of Study, which was established by Japan's Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) in 2018, one of the objectives for writing is: "If you use a lot of support regarding everyday topics, you can write while paying attention to the logic of information"(MEXT, 2018). MEXT (2019) provides example activities for supporting this attention to logic in writing. One of the suggested activities is having participants read essays and ask questions about them in pairs or groups. This raises the question of whether the participants know how to ask appropriate questions since if they have not learned how to verbalize such questions, the activity cannot succeed.
However, if most of the participants have learned how to properly ask questions, we can introduce the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a process designed to facilitate the asking of many questions (Rothstein & Santana, 2018). But since a combination of the QFT and Toulmin Model has never been studied, it is unknown whether the QFT can be adopted to support the abovementioned activity while focusing attention on the three elements. To fill this research gap, participants' comments regarding logicality (claim, data, and warrant) need to be analyzed using a KH Coder, open-source software for content analysis and text mining. As a result of such analysis, a proposal in this study can be implemented in a class. Moreover, students were induced to pay attention to claim, data, and warrant by the QFT activity.
