Article Review

STUDENT-INITIATED ATTENTION TO FORM IN WIKI-BASED COLLABORATIVE WRITING

Language Learning & Technology, February 2009, Volume 13, Number 1, pp. 79-95

http://llt.msu.edu/vol13num1/kessler.pdf

Greg Kessler is an assistant professor of CALL an interim director of the Language Resource Center at Ohio University. His research interests include CALL teacher preparation, CALL use in innovative pedagogical contexts and student and teacher autonomy in CALL contexts. He can be reached via his email: kessler@ohio.edu

The research is conducted with the purpose of investigating student behavior within a long-term interactive task that is done independently. The main aim is to identify students’ ability to learn a language autonomously, with emphasis given to grammatical accuracy throughout the task. The secondary aim of the study is to identify the degree as to which the respondents are able to correct their own and others’ grammar mistakes in a collaborative task that is done continuously. To collect the necessary data, the study was conducted in a period of 16 weeks, within an online content-based course for pre-service English teachers whom are non-native speakers of the language. The course was attended by 40 students aged between 21-23 years old. All of them were final year students of a BA program in an English Language Teaching in Mexico and their proficiency in English are of the intermediate level. During course instruction, students were obliged to attend class sessions at least three times a week in which they were required to complete tasks like weekly discussions, reviewing web-based contents, exchange forum posts, and finally collaborate on a wiki. Wiki is a program that allows the easy creation and editing of any interlinked Web pages, usually widely available in the internet. An example of a wiki is the infamous Wikipedia. In the study, the students were told to use one official wiki for the course to collectively define the term ‘culture’. The task was done continuously within the 16-weeks long semester of the course without the assistance of the instructor at all. The instructor instead just remained passive as he observed the students’ grammar and the corrections they offer to their own or their friend’s English. In the observation, heavier emphasis was given to the students’ word choice, subject/verb agreement, part of speech, punctuation, spelling, fragments, articles, coordination and run on sentence. At the end of the study, the researcher discovered that the students were very motivated to engage in the activity. The numbers of correcting that occurred were very high, suggesting the students’ willingness to express their views and critic their peers. However, the researcher also found that the students did not really pay much attention to grammar errors. It would seem that as long as they can understand the message of their peers’ writing, they would not provide further corrections. This shows that they were more aware of grammar when they were focusing on writing, not correcting. The reason behind the students’ lack of attention to the correct forms of grammar could probably be caused by the informal context of the task’s environment and the perceived low-impact nature of the errors themselves.

I think the research is very interesting as I find it very relevant to our Malaysian ESL context. This is so because during my practicum, I noticed that my students also show similar traits to that of the study’s participants. They were always eager to do collaborative writing tasks like peer-editing and proofreading, but would dismiss the importance of grammar accuracy most of the times. The errors in which the participants of the study commit were also significantly similar to the errors my students would usually make in writing tasks. The research also captured my interest as it was conducted in a very comprehensive and critical manner. This shows the commitment that the researcher had in order to ensure the study’s reliability and credibility. My only recommendation is that maybe the researcher should use other programs that can clearly record and show the changes made by the students to the wiki. This would enable him to probably see a clearer pattern of students’ tendencies in correcting their peers’ works, which could also be a great help in understanding reasons for their dismissal of grammar accuracy. In conclusion, I think this research could be a positive implication towards the teaching and learning of ESL in the general and Malaysian contexts. The methods used in the study could be employed by other teachers in ESL classrooms to find out more about their students’ weaknesses in writing. The study also proves how effective CALL or Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC, as coined by Levy and Stockwell, 2006) and collaborative writing activities can be to language learning, as suggested by Louth, McAllister and McAllister (1993).

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