Writing conferences via an online meeting platform

Abstract

A teacher-student writing conference is a one-to-one conversation between a teacher and a student on the latter’s writing. It is regarded as a very helpful way to give feedback to students (Harris 1986) and it has enjoyed popularity for over a century (Lerner 2005). However, a major problem with the approach is its time-consuming nature which greatly reduces its accessibility to large student populations. This article reports how I first used the approach with small student groups conferencing face-to-face (f2f) but later made it accessible to a large number of students by conferencing online via a meeting platform called TenCent Meeting, the equivalent of Zoom in China. My experiences since switching to online writing conferences has led me to believe that they are in fact superior to f2f ones in various respects. I have held writing conferences with undergraduates for many years, first f2f and recently online. My first writing conferences took place in 2008 in an attempt to help a group of students who were really weak in writing to pass a high-stakes national English examination called CET-4 (college English test band 4). To improve their writing, I required multiple drafts of authentic writing tasks from past papers incorporating feedback provided during f2f writing conferences immediately after English classes.