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THE EFFECTIVENESS OF ONLINE WRITING COLLABORATION ON EFL COLLEGE STUDENT
Shaker Rizk
Introduction
The problem with most EFL learners is their inability to communicate with native speakers both orally and in writing. This is mainly due to the little practice they have during their study in college and the absence of a native or native-like context/environment where they can produce and receive the language as spoken and written by the original speakers and writers of English. In addition, most of those learners are shy to communicate in English and fear their audience who may correct or criticize what they produce. In Egyptian colleges, as has been observed over the last thirty years, and as a result of the excessive number of students joining departments of English, very little time has been assigned to language practice, and the main emphasis has always been on theory and receptive skills. So many trials have been attempted by researchers and applied linguists to overcome such problems, but progress obtained has been insignificant compared to that gained with the receptive skills especially reading.
The application of technology to English language teaching in the 90s and the advent of the third millennium has encouraged a lot of researchers and teachers all over the world to utilize some technological devices to enhance the productive skills especially writing with most EFL students worldwide.
The present study reports on one of the trials undertaken at Suez Colleges of Education in Egypt to enhance Egyptian EFL college students’ writing and form positive attitudes towards writing through the use of online collaboration. The project was piloted to a group of senior students in the academic year 2000/2001 before it has been applied in the year 2001/2002.The main purpose of the present study has been to encourage Egyptian EFL college students to communicate through the Internet with their peers/tutors in Egypt and the USA so as to produce different written products on different modes. Specifically, the study aims to answer the following questions:
Does Online Writing Collaboration (OWC) help EFL college students at Suez Faculty of Education produce better written products?
Does (OWC) promote EFL college students’ at Suez Faculty of Education audience awareness while composing?
Does OWC influence EFL college students’ at Suez Faculty of Education attitudes towards writing in general and OWC in particular?
The Project
What is Online Writing Collaboration Project (OWC)?
Online Writing Collaboration means the collaboration of writers (EFL college students) with their class or other peers /instructors through the Internet to get feedback on their products. This simply means that there is some sort of communication with both native and nonnative writers before students turn in their written products.
What are the advantages of OWC?
1. OWCs’ main mission is to engage readers (peers/ tutors) into dialogue with writers (ESOL Students) to construct knowledge.
2. To improve ESOL learners’ English writing through Online Tutorial Writing Lessons
3. To motivate students to write in English and share their writing with real audience. OWC creates audience awareness, reduces stress associated with writing, and also creates positive attitudes towards learning in general due to the online collaboration nature.
4. To create cross-cultural communication channels through the synchronous (Real Time) Live Collaboration. This will provide Live Writing Tutoring to students, and more importantly connect them with people from the target language culture.
5. To Provide ESOL teachers from all over the globe with a virtual meeting place on cyberspace to share teaching ideas, successful teaching experiences, lesson plans, teaching materials, all for the sake of better English teaching and better English learning.
OWC has got so many advantages for EFL writers. It
1. Helps students construct, discover, and transform knowledge as they interact with each other.
2. Increases learners' self-confidence in their written & spoken language.
3. Develops positive student-teacher attitudes.
4. Creates positive attitudes towards English writing and English learning in general.
5. Allows shy students to participate in and write more, due to the nature of online writing.
6. Promotes gender equity in online discussion
7. Facilitates authentic communication
8. Creates Reading/Writing connection environment.
9. Encourages students to write and share writing in a collaborative setting
10. Creates audience awareness
11. Teaches students the art of trading/exchanging feedback.
12. Reduces stress associated with writing.
OWC Discussion Forums' Characteristics1. In OWC, learners collaborate with each other, exchange resources and above all, tutors (English native speakers teachers) coach them to construct their own knowledge about English writing in unstressed environment.
2. OWC forums' interactive discussion promotes ESOL learners' critical thinking due to its nature that enables learners to actively read and write in a circular process.
3. In OWC forums, students access multiple perspectives about their writing in one place. This positively enhances their writing and makes them envision their writing and their own culture from the other perspectives' point of view that goes beyond their own initial observation.
4. OWC discussion forums make students more confident about what they write. The powerful design of the forums makes ESOL learners' writing rich and thorough. As a result, their peers' reflection always empower them with more inputs of other learners, tutors and even professors who "ALL" have equal opportunities to express themselves in the online collaboration environment.
5. OWC aims to be English learners' life long learning place. It aims to fulfill English learners' writing needs by providing them unlimited support to solve their writing problems, tutorial lessons, live collaboration with tutors.
6. In OWC forums, threaded discussions enhance learners' higher order thinking as they are engaged in collaborative activities and as they become the doers and the knowledge formers rather than merely being the knowledge takers as always in the traditional learning environment.
7. Teachers and tutors have full access to the forums control panel so they can customize their class's activities the way they want.
8. In OWC forums, teachers can invite guests such as a text author, a figure in their field to come and address issues to their students' interests.
9. In OWC forums, students may use "emoticons" to express their feelings while responding to each other to make their collaborative activities more enjoyable and meaningful.
10. OWC forums enable students respond at anytime and from anyplace to their peers' writing in an unintimidated manner.
Review of the Literature
In this section, a review of research relating to the effectiveness of online writing collaboration in different places with college students is reported. Although most of the studies reported are in favor of utilizing computer technology (CT) in writing instruction, we have to take into account Langer and Applebee’s (1987:145) conclusion which states that "new views of instruction are not likely to replace more traditional views without well-orchestrated support for change on the part of the teacher, the school administration, and the general public”. This conclusion has to be seriously considered especially in the Egyptian context where the factors affecting any new change are highly influential.
Online interaction between students and their peers/tutors creates a real dialogue which is defined as the extent to which learners and instructors interact with each other. Interpersonal interaction among learners and social integration were among the most influential factors. A number of studies that examined socially oriented factors in Internet-based learning indicate that learners’ feelings or perceptions of being a socially integrated part of a virtual community or of having a sense of human contact in the network are much more important in this environment than in other distance education areas (Andrusyszyn, et al 1997). In addition, Reeve, et al (1998) state that the value of new technologies is the ability to promote learning dialogues among working professionals. It is argued that more and better forms of communication can be provided using new technologies, and thus, they can contribute to effective work-based learning.
Bullen’s (1998) case study investigates the potential of computer conferencing to facilitate critical thinking using both quantitative and qualitative data obtained from students in a university computer-conferencing course. In this study, Bullen reporte that although all students contributed to the online discussion, all used at least a minimal level of critical thinking, and many of them viewed the course as a more interactive and participatory experience than other face-to-face courses. This computer-conferencing course was not found to be an example of the new online learning paradigm. These findings suggest that active participation facilitating critical thinking is affected by a number of factors: students' characteristics, the context in which computer conferencing is implemented, course design, instructor interventions and facilitation, and content characteristics.
Inman, J (2000) and Inman, J et al (2000) examine computer technology (CT) use in writing centers. They emphasize the need for implementing CT in writing courses and stress the importance of the collaboration between writing specialists and technologists to foster the quality of writing of students in the writing centers.
Palmquist et al (1998) view networked communication as one method of tackling the difficult problem of attracting faculty who are less than enthusiastic about assigning writing as a traditional Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) program would recommend. Thus, they have developed an Online Writing Center that directly supports student writers and generates faculty support because of the enthusiasm the students share with their teachers.
McDonald, J. & Gibson, C.C. (1998) paper analyzes interpersonal interactions in asynchronous, computer-conferencing learning environments and identifies predictable patterns of group development within a computer-mediated course. Five categories of intent in the interpersonal messages were used in the classification: involvement, control, openness, solidarity, and conflict. It is found that the interpersonal patterns among people in computer conferencing are similar to those in face-to-face groups.
Murphy et al (1997) attempt to identify communication conventions in real-time, interactive instructional electronic chats (IECs) and to examine whether IEC users recognize a need to use these conventions to communicate clearly with others. IECs are thought to be a means of creating a sense of communicative immediacy and presence that is often lacking in asynchronous electronic communication environments. The findings report that IEC users developed communication conventions, such as sharing information, indicating interest in a topic, typing a keyword to convey meaning, using shorthand abbreviation, questioning and seeking clarification, and establishing various forms of social presence. In addition, IEC users recognized a need to use a variety of these conventions to reduce transactional distance in computer-mediated educational transactions.
Troffer (2000) shows that writing online helps teachers of writing and their students quickly grasp hypertext concepts in order to write effectively online. The theory and practical tips he offered in his study explain how to compose high-quality hypertext that readers will find easy to read and navigate. This lengthy study offers a lot of possible ways to effectively utilize the Internet in writing course
Method and Procedures
Sample
The subjects of the study were 80 senior college students enrolled in a Writing course at the Department of English, Faculty of Education, Suez Canal University, in the second semester of the academic year 2001/2002. The number of female students was 72 and only 8 male students participated in the project. Their ages ranged from 20 to 23 years and they all have had studied Essay writing for three years in college. In addition to the writing course, those students have studied English Grammar and Linguistics and have passed the Institutional TOEFL with scores ranging from 630 to 450. This indicates that those subjects are good at the structure of English and the mechanics of writing (punctuation, spelling, paragraphing…etc).
The problems with those students, as indicated by most of them at the first session of the course were their
1. fear of the teacher’s corrections and grades
2. fear of audience who may comment negatively on what they write,
3. inability to get resources that help them with their development of ideas,
4. lack of critical thinking and fear to give opposing viewpoints,
5. fear of final exams,
6. attempts to please their instructors because they are their sole audience,
7. inability to revise their drafts and concentration on surface-level areas such as spelling, punctuation, and grammar and not ideas or organization, and
8. writing for themselves and/or their teachers only.
Procedures
Phase One ( Setting the Scene )
In this phase all subjects had acquired computer skills during their three years of study at college before they stared the OWC project. The only skill they had to practice was to browse the Internet and post mail. This was done during a two-week orientation on how to use the website designed specifically for this purpose and for teaching/learning writing online. During this period, students were asked about the problems they have faced in writing courses and their expectations from the OWC project. A sheet was given to each student to list his/her problems and expectations. These were later ranked and matched with those of the teacher’s (the project’s mission).
After conducting the orientation period and obtaining the ranking and matching sheets, students were randomly divided into six groups to use the computer lab at college during six different sessions a week.
A pretest was given to all subjects the first week of classes. Students were asked to write about a topic of a persuasive mode. This mode was chosen because it will be the mode they will practice during the semester. It should be noted that the online practice is additional to the basic course work students do in class. This means that it is an extra-curricular activity which enables students communicate and practice their language with others.
Phase Two (OWC Practice)
In this phase students started working online to produce different products; personal, narrative, descriptive, persuasive, argumentative… and share them with their peers or tutors in class/abroad. Students posted their products and got feedback both on the topics they wrote about (cultural, social, and personal) and on the language they used and the organization or development of topic.
Steps to produce a draft
1. Students write a draft
2. They share it with others online through the website esol-owc.net
3. Peers and instructors give feedback relating to the topic in light of ideas, development, organization, language…etc
4. Students respond to the comments and try another draft making use of the suggestions and comments of those online
5. This process is repeated until students have a final draft
6. All drafts and the final are kept in a file/portfolio
7. Students respond to a checklist or self-assessment sheet in which they have to decide their own progress in light of the criteria set by the instructor
8. Final drafts are submitted for evaluation by students’ peers and instructors
9. Each student assigns a score/grade to his/her final product and chooses four of the products posted online to be assessed by other students/tutors.
10. All students used to keep a reflective journal in which they reported on their progress in college and/or any personal experiences they wanted to share with others. The Reflective journals are optionally shared with others online or in class.
Phase Three (Data Collection)
This phase started on the last week of classes (14th session) when all students were getting ready to submit all required assignments for final evaluation. All students turned in the following:
1. A posttest was given to all students. All students wrote about a topic of a ( persuasive mode )
2. All students had to fill out an attitude questionnaire to elicit their attitudes towards writing in general and OWC in particular ( see Appendix for details )
3. Each student had to submit his/her portfolio containing three self- and peer-assessed final drafts to be evaluated by other tutors
4. Students ( Optional ) may submit their Reflective Journals to check on their academic progress and see how they assessed their own performance.
5. The researcher and other tutors interviewed some students to get feedback from them on some issues relating to the pros and cons of the OWC project and the ways that can improve them.
Data Analysis
A. Pre/Posttest Holistic Scoring
Three professional raters who have had training on both holistic and analytic scoring of essays holistically scored the pre and posttests. The raters have practiced holistic scoring after attending training sessions conducted by the researcher. They have reached .96 interrater reliability which is considered a very high reliability. One rater is a Ph.D. holder and the other two are MA holders. They all work for the Suez Faculty of Education, English Department and have been teaching writing in college for at least three years. Two of them did the scoring and the third was acting as an arbitrator when two or more point –difference occurred.
B. Audience Interactivity & Awareness Measure
"Interactivity" and "Audience Awareness" were of course more difficult to define, but basically they are defined as the extent to which the writer is mindful of and responsive to a real or imagined reader
Three measures of online "interactivity" for the online texts: the number of posts, the number of words, and the Interactivity Score assigned to each student by the raters. The number of posts and number of words were simple counts. The Interactivity Score represented the total of the average rating for all of a student's e-mail posts. Three raters ( junior staff members all holding MA in English) were trained to score each e-mail as a one, two, or three for interactivity. A "one" rating meant that the message seemed to be non-responsive and non-interactive. Typically, these were messages that seemed to be addressed to no one (e.g., "Hey! This idea really works!") or messages that reported about the reading for the sake of fulfilling a class participation assignment (e.g., "I thought the article by Tarek or Kanaria was very interesting.") A "two" rating meant that the writer was interacting in a line of discussion, but was not responding to a particular reader or a particular message. For example, a message that said "I agree, that Essam’s viewpoint really is very interesting. I thought what he mentioned about terrorism and Islam is really interesting" was typically rated a two. A "three" rating meant that the writer was responding directly to another writer-- for example, "I agree with you Sherine 88, that was a really good point about women’s work after graduation." Raters scored each post on this scale, and an average score for all of the student's posts was calculated for each rater. These scores from each rater were added together and represent the Interactivity Score, which is on a scale of 3 to 9
While this system was simple, the three raters agreed that rating the email posts was "easy" and that the three categories seemed enough to adequately describe all of the messages. Using a Cronbach Coefficient, the rater interrelability was calculated to be .964 or about 96%.
C. Attitude Questionnaire
The 40- item questionnaire was analyzed in terms of some criteria that account for students’ attitudes towards writing in general and OWC in particular. Percentages and rankings of the different factors indicating students’ attitudes were considered.
Results and Discussion
1. Writing Quality
Three professional raters holistically scored both pre and posttests and the results obtained are shown in Table 1 below. As mentioned above the interrater reliability was as high as 96%. This indicates that raters were objective and followed the rubric developed from the anchor papers ( for details on how to develop rubrics for holistic scoring see Taky El-Din, 1985) .
Table 1
Comparison of Mean Group Scores on Quality of Writing
Tests | Mean | SD | t-value | P< |
PRE POST Change | 6.38 9.16 2.78 | 1.46 2.09 .63 |
_ 4.23 |
**001 |
There have been some statistically significant gains in students’ writing quality as shown in the above table. The change in score is significant at p< **001 level which indicates that it was not due to chance. The effect of OWC, since it was the medium of conducting the course, has been apparent in changing students’ writing quality.
2. Audience Awareness
The total number of posts for all 80 students was 1088 threads including all the topics they wrote for assessment by their peers/tutors. To measure students’ Audience Awareness/Interactivity the posts responding to topics were only calculated. The number of those posts was 678 posts which makes a percentage of 62.3%. The number of words in the 678 posts was 39562 with an average 58.4 words/post (thread). If we consider the average sentence to consist of seven words, the average sentences will be eight per post/thread.
The above figures prove that there was a positive reaction from students towards what their colleagues/peers wrote. This proves that both writers and respondents have had a sense of audience and they were both aware of their presence online. The number of words per thread/post, which indicates the number of sentences, also gives evidence to the lengthy responses that proves students involvement and interest in what was written.
Table two below shows students’AudienceAwareness/Interactivity”. It indicates that there is a high correlation among the three raters (96%), as stated above. It also shows that 60% of the students’ posts are focused and directly commenting or discussing the issue/topic of particular writers. They are aware of who they are writing to and on what they are writing. It shows directness of respondents to the person and topic. 24% are also positively responding to the topic/issue, but not to a particular writer. This tendency of indirectness is a feature of most Arabs when they write or speak (see Rizk, 2001). Only 18.7% are non-responsive/non-interactive. Those tend to direct their posts to no one and on comment on general issues. They tend to adopt very evasive styles just to show that they participate and prove that they are there.
Overall, the results in Table 1 indicate that students adopting OWC have acquired a high sense of Audience Awareness/Interactivity. This answers the second question of the study and gives evidence to students’involvement in what they read online. It also shows that the topics they were responding to were highly controversial and interesting ( most issues discussed some cross-cultural differences between Arabs and Americans.
Table 2
Students’ Audience Awareness/Interactivity
Raters | One | Two | Three | Total |
Rater # 1Rater # 2Rater # 3 | 130 110 142 | 162 176 156 | 386 392 380 | 678 678 678 |
Total | 382 | 494 | 1158 | 2034 |
Mean % | 127 18.7% | 165 24.3% | 386 60% | 678 100% |
Not surprisingly, there was a strong correlation between the number of words in email posts with the number of posts. The strong correlation between the number of posts and the interactivity score also suggests that those students who posted most frequently were also those most truly engaged with their colleagues in discussions. The correlation between the number of words and interactivity is also evident. But significantly absent is a correlation between audience awareness and any other variable.
3.Students'Attitudes
The items of the Attitude Questionnaire are grouped into six main categories to elicit students’ attitudes towards the following:
1. The influence of OWC on students’ writing (idea development, exchanging views, self confidence, authentic environment, constructing and developing knowledge) ( see items # 1, 6, 10, 14, 15, 16, 17, 27, 40).
2. The influence of working with peers/tutors online ( sense of audience , collaborative learning, corrections ) ( see items # 2, 3, 4, 8, 28, 31 )
3. The influence of feedback, comments, corrections, criticism on writing ( see items # 5, 22, 23, 30, 32 )
4. OWC influence on cross –cultural communication ( see items # 11, 12, 13, 19, 25 )
5. OWC and students’ attitudes towards writing ( see items # 9, 18, 20, 21, 24, 26, 29, 33 )
6. OWC influence on assessment and writing strategies ( see items 3 7, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39 )
An item analysis is conducted and the results are further grouped into three main categories, namely, Agreement, Uncertainty, and Disagreement. Table 3 shows the percentages and means of the three categories. It should be noted that the Uncertain percentage can be interpreted as either agree or disagree.
Table 3 shows that students have formed very high attitudes towards writing in general and OWC in particular. 76% of students have agreed with the items showing positive attitudes whereas only 8.7% have disagreed. Most students who agreed have indicated that they Strongly Agree with the statement and those who have indicated disagreement chose the Disagree only. This increases the percentage of Agreement among students. The following items were highly appreciated and scored by students:
1. I have positive attitudes towards OWC.
2. I have acquired more about the culture of Americans than before.
3. OWC has helped me construct, discover and transform knowledge.
Table 3
Attitude Questionnaire group percentages
Group | Agree | Uncertain | Disagree |
One Two Three Four Five Six | 74.5 76.9 76.6 74.5 76.4 79.1 | 18.2 15.3 12.3 16.2 14.4 13.6 | 7.3 7.8 11.1 9.3 9.2 7.3 |
Mean | 76.3 | 15 | 8.7 |
4. OWC has increased my self-confidence in my writing.
5. Teacher’s comments are no more threatening or embarrassing.
6. I am no shyer to communicate in English with both native and nonnative speakers of English.
7. I now write to real audience and have acquired the sense of audience awareness.
8. I now feel that I have formed critical thinking awareness.
9. I shared my peers/tutors comments and evaluation.
10. I can now assess my writing as well as that of other peers
11. My self-assessment is approximately the same as that of my peers and tutors.
12. Overall, OWC project has changed my academic strategies in acquiring English and I do recommend online teaching in other subjects and skills.
In an interview with some students chosen to clarify their responses about some issues, they mentioned that that was their first time over the past ten years to find a place where they could authentically practice their English. Some said “I have some American friends and we both discuss different matters online almost everyday…” “it is easy to find someone to share thoughts and ideas through OWC….no more fear, no more shyness..”, “ you have changed my whole life this semester why didn’t you do that four years ago when I first came to college.. I’m sad about the time I spent before without real practice.”
The results of the Attitude Questionnaire have added to the value and effectiveness of OWC. When compared with students’ reflections at the beginning of the semester about the use of technology in teaching writing, one can notice the unbelievable change in attitude at the end of semester (For further details in this respect, visit the esol-owc.net website and read the posts about students impressions about OWC before and after implementing the project).
Conclusion
The results of the study have shown that the OWC project utilized by Suez college students as one way to enhance their writing quality and form positive attitudes towards writing in general and using the Internet in language learning in particular, has proved to be a successful means. Results also show that the students of the study have acquired a higher sense of Audience Awareness while composing.
These results also suggest that the OWC forum is in itself a context and a different realm than the classroom or the off-line "traditional essay," as opposed to merely a conversational tool that compliments "real world" communities.
Regardless of the shortcomings and limitations of the project, it is recommended that all departments of English as well as those undertaking ELT as a career try implementing online collaboration, especially with the productive skills (writing and speaking).
Appendix (A)
Attitude Questionnaire
Dear Students
The following are some statements about OWC project. Please, take a few minutes to respond to them. This will help the Department of English modify, reconsider, reinforce, or neglect utilizing this project with your peers in the future. Your response will be highly confidential and will be valuable to us.
Please indicate the degree to which each statement applies to you. (5) Strongly agree, (4) Agree,(3) Uncertain,(2) Disagree, and (1) Strongly Disagree.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Statements | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 |
1. OWC has helped me write about different topics. 2. I have communicated in dialogues with other peers in class and abroad. 3. Online peer and tutor comments have helped me revise my essays. 4. Online peers and tutors gave me positive feedback. 5. Feedback has helped me better compose. 6. OWC has assisted me with resources to develop and increase my ideas. 7. I read some online tutorial lessons that helped me know more about writing strategies. 8. I shared my writing with different audience. 9. I now like writing and love to share it with others. 10. I have positive attitudes towards OWC and writing. 11. I have acquired more about the culture of Americans than before. 12. I have changed some of my conceptions about Americans after OWC. 13. I have clarified some cultural misconceptions to my American peers and tutors. 14. OWC is a good place to exchange views on academic and cultural issues. 15. OWC has helped me construct and discover knowledge in different disciplines. 16. OWC has helped me transform knowledge as I interact with others online. 17. OWC has increased my self-confidence in my writing. 18. OWC has helped me form positive attitudes with my teachers online and in class. 19. I no more fear communication in writing with both native and nonnative speakers of English. 20. I used my real name in posting my products. 21. I didn’t use my real name in posting my products, but I can use it now. 22. Teacher’s comments and corrections bothered me. 23. Teacher’s comments are no more threatening or embarrassing. 24. Teacher has become my friend online and in class. 25. I am no shyer to communicate in English with both native and nonnative speakers of English. 26. I don’t feel any gender differences when working online with peers and tutors. 27. OWC provides authentic/real environment for communication with English language speakers. 28. I now write to real audience and have acquired the sense of audience awareness. 29. I now fell that I have formed critical thinking awareness. 30. I now accept all criticism and comments without having any negative attitudes towards those who criticize or evaluate my written products. 31. I shared my peers/tutors comments and evaluation. 32. I found others’ comments valuable and modified my writing accordingly. 33. I now have very little stress when I write. 34. I acquired a lot of things that help me assess a piece of writing. 35. I can now assess my own writing as well as that of other peers. 36. I used to keep a reflective journal and write on it very frequently. 37. I feel that the reflective journal is a good way for writers who want to practice writing . 38. In my portfolio there are at least ten written pieces. 39. My self-assessment is approximately the same as that of my peers and tutors. 40. Overall OWC project has changed my academic strategies in acquiring English and I do recommend online teaching in other subjects and skills |
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