Post for Tuesday, February 28:

For Claudia, Kye, Upendo, Fang, and Rocky:  What are your experiences teaching with and/or using Wikis or Google Docs?  What do you think are their advantages or disadvantages?  How does this study relate to the two studies we read of face-to-face collaborative writing?  What are some of the more significant similarities and differences?

For our experimental online collaborative/cooperative writing pair, Amanda and Carrie: =  What do you think are their advantages or disadvantages of using wikis or google docs for writing or teaching writing?  How does this study relate to the two studies we read of face-to-face collaborative writing?  What are some of the more significant similarities and differences?                      

 

For Thursday, Feb 23:  Read Hyland, Chapter 6, and use the first page of yesterday's worksheet (items 3-7) to analyze your assigned study in your next blog entry.  (Amanda, please use the second page of the handout to propose a new empirical study based on Truscott's synthesis).  Thanks!

For Thursday, Feb. 15: What are the key results of the Dobao study?  What are their implications?  What are the study's strengths and weaknesses?  To help you evaluate this and other research-based articles, please see the section called "For blog posts on research-based articles" on p. 12 of the syllabus.

Post for Tuesday, Feb 14 class on Storch and Aldosari

By what mechanisms can collaborative composing contribute to language learning? How does the activity of collaborative writing compare to the activity of composing aloud?  What are the strengths and weaknesses of this study, including the relationship classification?                                                                         

For Thursday, Feb 9 (instead of the prompt in the syllabus):

After you read Hyland, Chapter 4, please formulate 2 questions you have about second language writing that we can try to turn into research questions and tentative study designs on Thursday.  Explain the background and impetus for each of your questions (e.g. did it come from your teaching experience, from something you studied in another course, from something you read in Hyland?).  What kinds of research methods that Hyland discusses might you use to answer each question?  Tell us about any previous research experience you've had using these methods.   

Hints: Questions about tasks, classroom contexts, teacher feedback, peer feedback, error, error treatment, genre features,  intertextuality, discourse communities, writing on social media, community literacies, writing processes, writing development, second language proficiency, writing expertise, etc.  

For Blog post by Monday, think-aloud activity and reflection