The Impact of Problem Based Learning on Teaching the Aspect of Audience in ESP Writing

Abstract

The main aim of this study was to test the influence of problem-based learning (PBL) on the teaching of students’ writing skills in English for specific purposes (ESP). There is very little research available that deal with specific aspects of writing, global and local, and their connections with the teaching method because researchers generally only test overall improvement of writing skills. According to the stated problem, goals and tasks, the research was performed by causal method – experiment with parallel groups. The experimental (treatment) group learned about the basic features of business writing according to pre-planned PBL teaching units. The same content was also taught in the control group by lecturing and illustrative teaching methods. Given the results, we can see that the experimental group had more pronounced trait score 2 for the aspect audience at the initial measurement, experimental group had more pronounced feature of score 4 at the final measurement. Student papers on the final measurement are fully compliant with audience, their status and relationship with the writer; i.e. tone, word choice, document type fully correspond to a given audience with the appropriate level of formality for a given audience. The results of t test for paired samples indicate that learning through problem solving is very useful if you want to develop aspect of audience in ESP writing as it encourages the development of higher-order intellectual skills and creative thinking, which are related to the global aspects of writing.