An increasing number of universities are providing the current generation of students, the socalled ‘digital natives’ (Prensky, 2001) - with more flexible and innovative language learning environments through the use of free Web 2.0 tools, such as wikis, blogs, social networking, Second Life and podcasting. However, still relatively little is known about wikis in the context of teaching English for Academic Purposes. My project aims to fill this research gap. I applied a case study strategy, where three groups of students attending a course Academic reading and writing for teacher candidates were examined. This paper demonstrates how the wiki software was employed in the course to encourage teacher candidates to proof-read and edit their own and others’ texts in order to be more accurate in academic writing. The present case study applied several research methods, including analysis of the texts written by students on the wiki and chat-room comments, an interview with the teacher of examined groups and a student questionnaire. The analysis of peer revisions was carefully conducted with a particular focus on: the variations in the way that students corrected each others’ texts, types of revised language issues, and the extent to which the teacher candidates were correcting accurately. My findings show that the students paid close attention to sentence structure (e.g. clauses, punctuation), fixing sentence problems (e.g. parallelism, choppy and stringy sentences), inflection and academic style. It is noteworthy that most of these languages issues were discussed in class. Considerably less attention was given by students to questions like paragraph structure and content. The accuracy of students’ revisions varied depending on the type of corrected language issue. The general impression of employing the wiki in this course was favourable. Many of the teacher candidates admitted that they would like to utilize the wiki tool in their future teaching courses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-77585 |
| Date | January 2012 |
| Creators | Kedziora, Beata |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Stockholm studies in English, 0346-6272, Stockholm studies in linguistics |
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