Writing, History, and Power in the Classroom

Many students experience difficulty with the tensions and disjunctures between their vernacular ways of communication and standardized college English. The history of linguistic standardization in European imperialism, however, provides a pedagogically helpful critical heuristic for examining with students the power relations inherent in college writing instruction. By historicizing the entanglements of language and power, students are empowered to choose how and what they want to learn based on an awareness of their educational situatedness and with the support of a open and reflexive instructor.

Real-time Online College Writing Teaching Methods to Promote Interaction Between Class Members －Based on the results of analyzing the needs of college students

The purpose of this study is to construct and propose real-time online college writing teaching methods to promote interaction between class members (instructor-learner, learner-learner). Through surveys and interviews with learners who hadn’t experienced real-time, online college writing education, we confirmed that the main perceptions and demands of learners for real-time online classes were as follows: First, the learners’ reluctance to show oneself in such a class and the demand for interaction with minimal online exposure. Second, the burden of writing in an isolated environment and the demand for detailed assistance of instructor’s in the writing process. Third, the reluctance to show the learner’s written text and the demand for receiving sufficient feedback anonymously. Therefore, this study proposed the following three teaching methods: First, a method to ensure learner anonymity to allow learners to participate in classes using a “sub-character” rather than their real names. Second, to conduct a short [lecture-practice-feedback] method, instead of a one-time [lecture-practice] method, was implemented several times in one class. Thirdly, to simultaneously share the learners' practice results through chat windows and to provide multiple types of feedback. This study confirmed that the proposed methods promote interaction between members in an online writing education environment and generate positive teaching and learning effects by reviewing specific class application cases and the learners' responses to these classes.

Writing Process Photo Essay

This article describes and reflects on experiences teaching students to compose a “Writing Process Photo Essay” in the context of an upper-division college writing course that satisfies a campus-wide writing requirement. As the culmination of a quarter-long student inquiry into their own writing processes, this multimodal assignment asks students to combine text and images to help them reflect on the environments, tools, habits and routines that surround their writing activity. This assignment takes its inspiration from calls for renewed scholarly attention to material and embodied aspects of writing process. In the end, this assignment creates opportunities for students to recognize, reflect, and reimagine their own writing activity in school contexts and beyond.

EFL Students’ Perceptions of Collaborative Writing in a Private University, Vietnam

Writing is widely held as the most important but sophisticated skill in learning foreign languages, including English. In particular, in college writing, students need to acquire and improve their writing performance in order to communicate ideas to intended audience or academia. Thus, as a communicative activity, writing cannot be done in isolation. Instead, collaborative writing has been advocated as a socially constructed activity done by more individuals to produce a particular text. However, individual writing still dominates in the writing context in Vietnam, thereby deterring students from writing collaboratively with others. This paper therefore seeks the students’ perceptions about collaborative writing. Data collected for this study include questionnaire and interviews. Participants were147 students of English at a university in the Mekong Delta, Vietnam. The findings indicate that students had positive perceptions about collaborative writing. Implications for collaborative writing are also provided.