Enhanced collaboration in foreign language education: use of wikis in collaborative writing projects

Abstract

This thesis investigates the use of wikis in foreign language education and students' attitudes toward the integration of wiki-based collaborative writing activities into their foreign language learning process. The effects of three different task types: (a) argumentative, (b) informative, (c) problem-solving on the number of peer/self corrections and meaning/form related changes were examined based on and adapted from Kessler's (2009) and Kessler and Bikowski's (2010) taxonomies. 34 upper-intermediate EFL students who studied at the preparatory school of a private university participated in collaborative writing tasks in groups of four for five weeks using Wikispaces. In the argumentative task, they were asked to write an argumentative essay. In the informative task, they were asked to choose a city from Turkey and prepare a visitor's guide for the city they had chosen. In the problem-solving task, they were asked to offer advice on problems taken from the Dear Abby website. Students formed new groups for each task. After they completed the tasks, a questionnaire adapted from Lee (2010) and Hazari, North, and Moreland (2009) was conducted with them to explore their overall experience with the integration of wiki-based collaborative writing tasks into their foreign language learning process. In addition, a focus-group interview with six randomly chosen students was carried out. After the completion of the tasks, all the wiki pages the students created, the results of the questionnaires and the focus-group interview were analyzed. Descriptive statistics and Chi-square tests were used to analyze the quantitative data. The results revealed that the argumentative task promoted more peer corrections than the informative and problem-solving tasks. In addition, the informative task yielded more self corrections than the argumentative and problem-solving tasks. Moreover, use of wiki-based collaborative writing tasks led to accurate use of the grammatical structures 94% of the time. The results of the study also suggested that the students paid more attention to meaning rather than form regardless of the task type. Finally, the students stated that they had positive experiences using wikis in foreign language writing and they believed that their writing performance had improved.