Education technology - higher education
M. Jafarigohar; M. Karami
Abstract
All over the world, many IELTS candidates still experience difficulty in mastering skills needed for academic writing. Collaborative writing in a wiki might be a good way to address this difficulty. Thus, the current study has investigated and compared the effectiveness of the single-author peer-editing ...
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All over the world, many IELTS candidates still experience difficulty in mastering skills needed for academic writing. Collaborative writing in a wiki might be a good way to address this difficulty. Thus, the current study has investigated and compared the effectiveness of the single-author peer-editing strategy and the multiple-author co-authoring strategy in wiki. The participants were 20 male graduate and postgraduate students who had enrolled in an IELTS academic module preparation class. The study had an equivalent time series design in which the intervention period had six times: At odd times of intervention peer-editing was the strategy and at even times it was co-authoring. When peer-editing was the chosen intervention strategy for wiki writing, each participant created their own IELTS academic writing essay and at the same time edited the essays of their peers. For co-authoring tasks, all participants were required to co-write a coherent essay. A one-way repeated measures ANOVA was applied to compare the time series in terms of the effectiveness of interventions. The results revealed that the wiki group achieved greater improvement in their writing performance while co-authoring their essays. It should be remarked that the present study is one the first studies on identifying the most effective collaborative writing strategies in social networking systems, while most of the previous studies have addressed a comparison between collaborative writing instruments. The findings of this study might be a very crucial step toward the candidates’ success in international foreign language tests.
Education technology - Lifelong learning
M. Jafarigohar; M. Karami
Abstract
Traditional EFL reading assessment has been criticized for providing learners with almost no instructional feedback thus extensively ignoring learning enhancement and learner training. In an attempt to address this gap, the present study was designed to determine whether mediations in a dynamic assessment ...
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Traditional EFL reading assessment has been criticized for providing learners with almost no instructional feedback thus extensively ignoring learning enhancement and learner training. In an attempt to address this gap, the present study was designed to determine whether mediations in a dynamic assessment program have significant effects on the development of reading comprehension strategies. Using a convenience sampling method, four intact EFL classes comprising of 116 male students were selected from two high schools in Hamedan, Iran. The study used a quasi-experimental design that included a pretest, a posttest, and a delayed posttest. The participating classes were randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. A one-way between-groups analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) was applied to compare the effectiveness of two different interventions. During the experiment, participants in the control group received non-dynamic reading tests, while participants of the experimental group underwent DA sessions receiving mediation on applying reading comprehension strategies. The participants were also given the reading strategy questionnaires. Results indicated that training reading comprehension strategies through annotations and oral mediation in DA had a positive immediate and delayed effect on enhancing awareness and use of such strategies, particularly for low achievers.
