Writing and New Technologies
THE CHALLENGES OF DEVELOPING AND EVALUATING AN ENGLISH ACADEMIC WRITING WEBSITE FOR USE IN DIFFERENT INSTRUCTIONAL SETTINGS
1 2 Julia Miller , Kate Wilson
1
School of Education, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia University of Canberra, Canberra, Australia
2
New technologies present opportunities but also challenges for academic writing instruction, including student and classroom access to the Internet. Research also indicates a dearth of evidence as to the efficacy of technology use in language teaching (Golonka et al. 2014). When designing an academic skills website, for example, it is therefore important to provide materials in different formats to suit a range of learning situations, and research should evaluate their effectiveness. The English academic skills website in this presentation includes creative videos, explanations and interactive exercises. The theoretical principle guiding its development and evaluation was Biggs’ Structure of the Observed Learning Outcome (SOLO) taxonomy (2011) which had not, to our knowledge, been applied previously to evaluate online academic writing resources. To investigate the effectiveness of the resources, inclass tests with a control group (n = 244), focus groups with students and lecturers (n = 54), and online evaluations (n = 107) compared participants’ levels of understanding of different academic skills areas before and after using the resources. The results indicate that both students and lecturers increased from a “unistructural” to a “relational” or “extended abstract” level of understanding (Biggs 2011), where they used higher order thinking skills to apply their new knowledge in unfamiliar situations. The resources may therefore be effective for lecturers or students teaching and studying English in many different contexts: online, in flipped/inverted classrooms, or as selfstudy and homework materials, both online and in printed format. The SOLO taxonomy is recommended for the evaluation of similar resources.
References
Biggs, J. (2011) Academic: SOLO Taxonomy [online] < http://www.johnbiggs.com.au/academic/solotaxonomy/ > [ 7 January 2015]
available
from
Golonka, E.M., Bowles, A.R., Frank, V.M., Richardson, D.L., and Freynik, S. (2014) ‘Technologies for Foreign Language Learning: A Review of Technology Types and their Effectiveness’. Computer Assisted Language Learning 27 (1), 70105