Student-initiated attention to form in wiki-based collaborative writing.(Report)

CONCLUSION

The notion of an autonomous environment in which students can collaboratively construct meaning without any teacher intervention is appealing and may contribute to autonomy through increased opportunities for practice. However, the use of autonomous space may require some additional management in order for students to reap all potential benefits. It appears that students are willing to collaborate in such autonomous environments, but they may not have the inherent willingness to strive for total accuracy. It may be important to provide students with varied contexts in which they can interact. They may benefit simultaneously from autonomous contexts in which they do not feel compelled to strive for accuracy as well as contexts that provide explicit demands for accuracy. Students in this study demonstrated the ability to correct and learn from their own and classmates' form errors, but not the willingness to do so when working in an online context, engaged in a task that they recognized as primarily focused on the creation of meaning. In fact, it appears that the degree of accuracy that participants achieved was acceptable for their purposes in this task. This may indicate that certain tasks and environments require more explicit practices and related expectations.

The teacher candidates felt that they would like to utilize similar tasks in their own teaching with perhaps a slight inclusion of teacher intervention. If an increased level of accuracy were determined to be necessary, perhaps students could be encouraged to attend more to accuracy. Perhaps the inclusion of non-Spanish speakers, or even native English speakers, would motivate students to strive for greater accuracy. Perhaps a sequence of regularly scheduled activities alternating between a focus on content and accuracy would accomplish this goal. Future research will certainly contribute to interesting variations of this collaborative construction task, including the degree of intervention by teachers.

APPENDIX

Questions that Guided Interviews

* What did you think were the merits and weaknesses of the different forms of computer-based communication used in the course?

* Discussions Chat Wiki Skype

* What was your preferred form of computer-based communication used in the course?

* What was you impression of the weekly discussions?

* Did you benefit from the exchange of ideas with your peers?

* If so, can you think of one example?

* Do you think your peers benefited from your contributions to the discussions?

* If so, can you think of one example?

* What did you think of the use of Wikipedia as a source for content?

* Do you think your peers benefited from your contributions to the wiki?

* Did you benefit from your peers contributions to the wiki?

* What was your overall impression of the collaborative wiki writing task?

* What was your overall impression of the Moodle site?

* What was your favorite aspect of the site?

* Did you enjoy using the Moodle site as a student?

* Would you consider using a system like Moodle as a teacher?

* Would you consider using online discussions as a teacher?

* Would you consider using a collaborative wiki as a teacher?

* What do you think about this contribution that you made to the wiki?

* Is there anything else about the class that you would like to share?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr. Dawn Bikowski and Mike Dombroski for their contributions to this study. The author also greatly appreciates the editors and reviewers for their valuable insights and careful consideration.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Greg Kessler is an assistant professor of CALL and 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.

E-mail: kessler@ohio.edu

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Greg Kessler

Ohio University

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