Sessions

Constructivism approach for academic writing through technology: Writing process through collaborative peer activities

This presentation aims to demonstrate how language teachers can facilitate students’ collaborative work for writing for a variety of academic genres. Students can work collaboratively at each stage of the writing process. For example, in the pre-writing phase, students participate in collaborative brainstorming to develop their topic ideas using applications such as Padlet or Zoom. Collaborative brainstorming encourages students to gain different perspectives and ideas of their peers. In addition, brainstorming and collaborative pre-writing activities result in improving students’ writing ability and influencing their writing pieces positively (Abedianpour & Omidvari, 2018; McDonough & Neumann, 2014). As for the writing stage, an iterative model in which students exchange their papers and continue to write their peers’ papers is used to increase students’ opportunities for collaboration (Eckstein, 2011). Regarding the post-writing activity, students who choose the same topic share their papers and summarize their writing pieces together into infographic, report or newsletter genres. Piktochart or Canva, which is a graphic design platform, is used for this activity. Participants are expected to come away with ideas to incorporate students’ collaboration into pre-writing, writing and post-writing activities in academic genres of writing using technology: Padlet, Google doc, Canva, Piktochart, Google hangout and Zoom video conference. Participants are expected to learn a) how to facilitate collaborative work in the writing process, b) how to use different online platforms to maximize students’ collaboration.