A study on the effective use of wiki software in the teaching of English writing.

Abstract

This study explores the effective way of utilizing wiki technology in the teaching of English writing. To this end, the study developed a wiki-based collaborative writing model with creativity techniques and investigated its educational effects on EFL learners’ writing. The participants were 130 middle school students in Korea and they were divided into a wiki-based group (n=65) and a traditional group (n=65). The major findings are as follows: First, the wiki-based collaborative writing model was more effective in enhancing Korean student’s writing skills than the traditional model. Second, the wiki-based writing model was more beneficial to high-level English proficiency students than the traditional writing model, whereas both writing models showed equal effectiveness in developing low-level proficiency students’ writing skills. Third, the participants of the wiki-based group responded positively to their experience of utilizing the wiki in the collaborative writing task. All of the results suggest that the wiki technology should be actively integrated into the teaching of English writing to overcome the limitations of the traditional writing class and expand it to an online space for the efficient English secondary education in Korea.