The impact of teacher and peer dialogue on online collaborative writing in an authentic science literacy learning environment

• Main Author: Keating, John G.
• Published: Open University 2013
• Subjects: 507.12
• Online Access: https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.602377

This research is concerned with authentic science writing, and in particular, investigating collaborative science writing at secondary school level, using an online collaborative-writing environment. Specifically, it investigates how measures of successful authenticity relate to (i) how close to the text-structure of a prototypical library report genre are collaboratively-written student papers (i.e., how close to the model students were taught) (ii) to what extent do the papers use the language of science as expected at this level of schooling, for example, use of nominalization, and finally, (iii) what is the degree of participation and contribution by students in a collaborative writing task? The research also examined how students' collaboratively written texts evolved, or changed, over time in terms of their textual structure and of their key linguistic features. The research provides some insight into how text changes and evolution could be explained in relation to online dialogue and feedback. Finally, the thesis identifies the implications of the above for pedagogy and policy, i.e., for (i) students' language development in science and the use of genre pedagogies, (ii) collaborative writing in science, and (iii) on line pedagogy?