EFL College Student Perceptions, Engagement, and Writing Developments in a Wiki-Based Interuniversity Collaborative Writing Project

One of the important issues in EFL instruction is the idea of eliminating students’ linguistic errors through providing corrective feedback (CF). Accordingly, this study investigated the effect of various CF types (i.e., comprehensive, selective, and no feedback) on advanced EFL learners’ writing in different writing conditions (i.e., individual & collaborative). 132 EFL advanced learners aged from 14-20 were considered as the main participants. Learners were divided into 6 groups (i.e., three individual and three collaborative writing conditions). Furthermore, each writing condition included three groups with selective, comprehensive and no correction orientations. Data collection tools and procedures encompassed an institutionalized Placement Test, pre-test, and post-test. The treatment that lasted for nine sessions was followed by a post-test. Data was submitted to a series of ANOVA tests with follow up pair-wise comparisons and independent-samples t-tests. Findings indicated that: (1) CF, especially selective one, was more effective in enhancing learners’ writing accuracy, and (2) members of the collaborative writing groups outperformed those in the individual ones in terms of their writing accuracy development. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed in relation to enhancing writing accuracy of the learners.

We have used wiki technology to support large-scale, collaborative writing projects in which the students build reference texts (called WikiTextbooks). The goal of this paper is to prepare readers to adapt this idea for their own courses. We give examples of the implementation of WikiTextbooks in a variety of courses, including lecture and discovery-based courses. We discuss the kinds of challenges that WikiTextbooks address and focus on critical design decisions. Finally, we conclude with a suggested template wiki project that is approachable for new users and appropriate for many course structures.

In recent years, many studies have used social media data to make estimates of electoral outcomes and public opinion. This paper reports the findings from a meta-analysis examining the predictive power of social media data by focusing on various sources of data and different methods of prediction; i.e., (1) sentiment analysis, and (2) analysis of structural features. Our results, based on the data from 74 published studies, show significant variance in the accuracy of predictions, which were on average behind the established benchmarks in traditional survey research. In terms of the approaches used, the study shows that machine learning-based estimates are generally superior to those derived from pre-existing lexica, and that a combination of structural features and sentiment analyses provides the most accurate predictions. Furthermore, our study shows some differences in the predictive power of social media data across different levels of political democracy and different electoral systems. We also note that since the accuracy of election and public opinion forecasts varies depending on which statistical estimates are used, the scientific community should aim to adopt a more standardized approach to analyzing and reporting social media data-derived predictions in the future.

This study applies a multi-semiotic perspective to investigation of EFL writing as represented by Taiwanese children. The study intends to understand the multimodal nature of EFL writing. This case study draws its data from students in grade one (age 7) to grade six (age 12). Students were required to write in English and to ”teach” writing in order to reveal how they represent English writing. The study found that young writers use various semiotic resources to represent English, including shapes, both natural and geometric. This study provides an alternative to currently dominant single-modal (language only) perceptions of writing.

In this paper, I provide a model for language identification that makes use of neural networks. The approach is intended to distinguish between Indian regional and dialectal languages. Individuals of Indian descent are the target population for this model. I train the model using a variety of data sources, including corpora of written and spoken material in a variety of languages. In addition, I use a variety of additional data sources. As a result, we can train the model to be more accurate. When I compare the performance of our model to that of a naive Bayes classifier, I find that the results produced by our model are superior to those produced by the naive Bayes classifier. This is because our model considers more information than the naïve Bayes classifier. The ReLu activation function is employed on each neuron throughout our simulation, and the neural network design comprises several layers. Each neuron receives the ReLu activation function. This allows the model to capture the relationships and correlations that exist between the input data, which improves its capacity to recognize the language employed in a specific sentence. Furthermore, our technology can deal with ambiguous cases, such as sentences written in the devnagri script, which is utilized in a number of Indian languages. This is a benefit provided by our software. Using our system has several advantages, and this is only one of them.

The study was designed to investigate how collaborative writing techniques influence on English writing products of Korean college students and the improvement of their English writing abilities, compared to an individual writing opportunity. 54 college students (48 Korean students and 6 international students) taking two parallel in-tact English composition classes offered by a national university participated in this study. The participants, depending on which section of the writing course they registered, were asked to work on writing an English essay either collaboratively or individually, as three writing phases, pre-, during-, and post-writing step with a variety of activities, proceeded. Three major research instruments (students` written texts, survey, and interview) were employed to answer three research questions on the contribution of collaborative writing to their English writing improvement. The findings were that collaborative writing techniques were helpful for EFL college students not only to achieve knowledge of English, in particular, usage of grammar and punctuation but to develop their communication skills and English writing strategies even though the study failed to demonstrate that students writing their essay collaboratively produced better written texts than those writing individually. Lastly, pedagogical implications for college English composition courses and suggestions for future studies were also provided.

Developing adequate English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing skills is of paramount importance for students’ success in higher education in Oman. The traditional teaching approaches adopted in writing courses often lead to students’ disengagement, however. Although several studies have examined students and teachers’ perceptions of flipped instruction in various EFL courses, no study has examined the impact of flipping on students’ engagement in writing courses. This practice-based research project, where the instructor was the researcher, explored the impact of flipped teaching on 57 General Foundation Program (GFP) EFL learners’ behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in academic writing in a higher education institution in Oman, and the variations that exist in students’ engagement according to gender, age, English language proficiency and technology skills. The study adopted a mixed-methods design and used a student engagement questionnaire, focus group interviews and participant observations to collect data. Descriptive and inferential statistics and deductive and inductive analytical procedures were used to analyse the quantitative and qualitative data respectively. The study presents new practicable knowledge about the implementation and implications of flipped instruction for Omani EFL students’ engagement in academic writing at the GFP level. It proposes flipping as an instructional approach which helps to address GFP students’ lack of 4 behavioural, cognitive, emotional and agentic engagement in writing courses in the Omani context. Behaviourally, students in the flipped classroom experience increased effort, improved concentration levels, persistence, communication and collaboration, and amelioration in their attitude to class attendance. It is reasonable to conclude that learners undergo cognitive growth and develop self-regulatory strategies and meta-cognitive awareness. At the level of emotional engagement, learners initially experience negative emotions such as anger and frustration, and then more positive emotions such as contentment and increased interest in the subject as they adapt to the flipped teaching-learning model. Flipping also seems to influence students’ autonomy and ability to ask questions and express opinions. It appears, however, that this approach does not influence students’ capacity to contribute to their own learning resources and activities. This study makes a valuable contribution to knowledge about students’ engagement in EFL writing courses. It revealed that a strong positive correlation exists between students’ behavioural, cognitive and emotional engagement, and that a positive correlation exists between students’ technology skills and linguistic proficiency and several aspects of their engagement. The study demonstrated, however, that no correlation exists between gender and age and students’ engagement in the flipped classroom. Furthermore, this practice-based research indicated that although flipped instruction helps to address the problem of students’ disengagement in writing courses in our context, factors such as students’ linguistic proficiency and technology skills should be taken into consideration before implementing this instructional approach in the current setting.

Like all national literatures in the world, Taiwanese (also known as Tâi-gi) literature was naturally initiated using Tâi-gi native speakers'mother tongue, and developed from oral to written form. Tâi-gi literature started with folk literature (oral literature), and, after a period of creation and learning of writing system, achieved the sequential form of written literature. Accordingly, a research on the development of Tâi-gi literature should begin with its oral form probing and estimating the works, then extend to the exploration of Tâi-gi literature written in Chinese (Han) characters and Romanized spelling system (Pėh-ōe-ji), analyzing their respective developments. It’s relatively appropriate to pay attention to the period when Taiwan was under Japanese colonial rule. Taiwanese literature transited then from classical litery Chinese form to the modern written vernacular form. It was a spectacular era when polyphonic linguistic landscapes arose and multilingual writing blossomed. After the World War II, Tâi-gi literature, oppressed by KMT who took measures to promote Chinese Mandarin as National Language, could merely exist in the publication and religious practices in the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan (PCT) or believers’ personal use, as well as in the texts for performing arts, such as Tâi-gi pop songs, folk theaters and operas, modern theaters, narrative ballads and ballad text books, etc. Tâi-gi literature in the other spheres almost vanished completely. Not until the 1980s' and along with the rise of the Language Revitalization Movements did Tâi-gi literature restore its vitality and regain the way to development. In the development of Tâi-gi literature along with the awakening of the cultural awareness of mother tongue, many problems were encountered and had to be solved, such as the argument about writing systems, difficulties in informatization of Tâi-gi literature data and writing systems, establishment of the subjectivity of Taiwanese literature, and academic institutionalization of its subject areas, etc.

Due to the social turbulence that resulted from the fierce partisan competition, the Taiwanese people usually tend to refrain from voicing their political opinions in public or in unfamiliar settings. Through the secondary analysis of the survey data on the 2006 Taipei mayoral election, the current study intended to explore how the voters in Taipei think of the issue of the Red Shirt Movement and their willingness to speak out on political affairs. The result showed there is little difference in proportion between those who agree and those who disagree with the Red Shirt Movement. Yet most of the respondents were unwilling to talk about politics in public settings. Furthermore, it was found that the extent to which people were involved in the Red Shirt Movement, the perception of then-President Shui-Bian Chen's integrity, and the amount of attention to the election news in newspaper were positively associated with respondents' willingness to speak out on political issues. Besides, respondents' ethnic background was found negatively related to their willingness to express political opinions. However, there is no significant association between respondents' attitudes toward the issue of the Red Shirt Movement and their willingness to talk about political affairs in public settings. It is apparent that, through these results, the current study has to face the deficiency both in data and in theoretical applicability.

Written from a practice-as-research perspective, this thesis focuses on the use of testimony in creating material for the stage. Designed as a reflexive performance ethnography and action research study, the work is concerned with developing a new performative strategy to address the memory of pain in the aftermath of conflict and to contribute to rebuilding communities dispersed by social and political unrest. Informed by methodologies and performance practices involved with the curation of testimonial content and conceptually inspired by the work of theatre director Augusto Boal, anthropologist Victor Turner and psychiatrist Dori Laub, Memodrome, as I named my technique, resides within the field of Applied Drama. It is intended to facilitate the direct interaction between a testifier and an empathic witness while generating simultaneous narratives based on the memories of the participants and their synergetic experiences. By using testimonial performance to explore aspects of the exilic and diasporic experience of Romanians in the UK and by making reference to the political and social tensions in the aftermath of the 1989 anti-communist revolution, this research aims at contributing to the understanding of how the experience of pain can reshape the cultural behaviour of a community and address feelings of belonging. Memodrome: Incubator, Memodrome: Roots and Memodrome: Home, the three performances I have created for the purpose of this PhD research, are experimental laboratories based on the particular and various experiences of life impacted by coercive and oppressive political governance. Memodrome: Incubator presents the testimony of a Romanian refugee artist who escaped a 30 years sentence in a communist prison by fleeing to the UK. Memodrome: Home explores testimonies of four Romanian migrants in the UK while Memodrome: Roots, constructed as a counter performance, captures the testimonies of six Romanians who are still based in their native country but reportedly feel that life under communism affected their feelings of belonging. The three case studies mentioned above constitute the foundation for developing a new performative strategy aimed at supporting communities affected by conflict to claim their past, commemorate painful experiences and celebrate survival. Examining the role of collective memory in the formation of public narratives, my proposal offers an alternative space where tensions can be negotiated through democratic means of spectatorship and collective authorship. This project demonstrates how capturing and performing personal testimonies can bring members of the community together and bridge differences. This work is structured in three main parts, each organised with several chapters and subchapters. In the first part of this thesis, I will provide a brief historical context and discuss how Romanian cultural behaviour has been reshaped in the shadows of the communist oppression. I will explore issues of identity in the aftermath of the anti-communist revolution in 1989 and argue that Romanians formed a new nation, one of people who lost their sense of place and belonging. I will also present my methodological approach articulating my affiliation with the practice of Applied Drama and explain how my academic and cultural background allowed me to engage with this work from a performative ethnographic perspective. In addition, in the first part of the written work, I will reflect on theoretical aspects with reference to memory, trauma, identity and nationhood and show how testimony can provide a powerful and restorative device in negotiating the tensions within communities affected by pain and oppression. In the second part of the research I will illustrate the conceptual framework of how I developed this new performative strategy to address the life of communities affected by painful pasts and to promote routines of reconciliation between its members by using testimony and performance. I will be reflecting on performativity, performance and the making of the self from an experiential perspective. Moreover, I will provide a theoretical framework to locate my practice alongside existing practices including Augusto Boals’s Forum Theatre technique and his concept of simultaneous dramaturgy that has influenced my thinking and technical approach. I will be articulating performative aspects which inform my strategy and establishing in particular how participative performance, as an art of experience, can provide a valuable platform for democratic spectatorship and collaborative authorship. The present study is carried in the form of a practice-as-research PhD and therefore I will describe the process of creating three performances – Memodrome: Incubator, Memodrome: Home and Memodrome: Roots – and using them as investigation tools to design a new performative strategy I have called Memodrome. The third part of this work is concerned with the illustration of the practice and demonstrating how performance art, especially Applied Drama, is defined by the process rather than result. The three case studies that I will be presenting emphasise how performing testimony and the staging of oral histories can respond to questions of belonging and social interaction while driving the negotiation of identities in the public sphere. For example, Memodrome: Incubator – where I staged the story of Mariana Gordan, a Romanian exile living in Britain for the past thirty years and Memodrome: Home – where I staged the testimonies of four Romanian migrants living in London – can both be read as counter narratives to the story of Romanian migration in the UK. They all articulate frames of selfhood that have been only very rarely, if never, represented in the British mainstream public space with connection to the Romanian diaspora: the role of the artist, gender diversity, women activism, otherness versus togetherness. Likewise, Memodrome: Roots, produced in Romania, provides an insightful picture of the struggles concerning the identity of the Romanian self and the contrastive narratives of its cultural embodiment. I will conclude each case study with the learnings and reflections extracted from each performance and describe my decision making based on those findings. A relatively new way of engaging with both research and arts or producing new knowledge1, the practice-as-research model can yet pose some challenges and tensions within different academic frames. As a practitioner at core, my writing will be aiming at capturing the essence of the practice in the making, the process and the experience.

Constructivist learning mechanisms such as collaborative writing have emerged as a result of the development of Web 2.0 technologies. We define the term mandatory collaborative writing to describe a writing activity where the group has a firm deadline. Our study focuses on how a wiki can fully support mandatory group writing. The motivation of this design science research study emerges from a graduate Knowledge Management class assignment to write a wiki book. The project outcome shows that the wiki instance used for the project, MediaWiki, could better facilitate the process with a set of extensions that support discussion, evaluation, and project management. We outline designs for these mechanisms: 1) a discussion mechanism that changes the way users discuss content on a wiki page and increases group awareness; 2) an evaluation mechanism that provides a tool for the instructor to monitor and assess students’ performance; and 3) a project management tool that increases awareness of the status of each component of the writing project and provides an overall summary of the project. A demonstration of the principles to a focus group provided a basic proof of the validity of these mechanisms.

Background: Emergency residents' ability to manage critically urgent patients is an essential skill. Simulation-based education provides learning opportunities in a patient harm-free setting. Objectives: The purpose of the study was to design a simulation training program and assess patient care skill of different levels of residents. Methods: This study enrolled twelve residents in a simulation-based emergency management curriculum. The curriculum was held every two months. Participant studied the trainee manual as a pre-course assignment. After completing three SBE classes in six months, we used an action-item checklist to assess residents in four different scenario stations. Residents completed the pre-simulation written test and a survey with the perceived effectiveness of the simulation-based curriculum at the end of the assessment. Results: The third-year residents outperformed the other residents. The overall residents' simulation average score in four scenarios were higher than the pre-simulation curriculum written test (70.4 ± 7.3 vs. 63.3 ± 9.8), and there is a significant difference (p ＜ 0.05). The perceived effectiveness was higher for R1 than R2 and R3 ( 4.8, 4.0, 3.7, p ＜ 0.05). Scores for overall satisfaction in residency training after the integration of simulation-based education into the curriculum were positive up to 85.0. Conclusion: Our simulation-based education training program is effective in improvement and assessment of residents' patient care skill.

This article describes the life of Ye Jung-chong as an anti-Japanese intellectual in the post-colonial era. Before World War II, Ye Jung-chong was a right-wing intellectual of the anti-Japanese movement. Such had been his image in modern Taiwan. After the war, he published a series of works in the 1960s when Taiwan was still under martial law, thereby passing down his experiences and memories of the anti-Japanese movement in the 1920s to the younger generation. This article attempts to explore the historical background and his life experiences that changed Ye Jung-chong from an anti-Japanese intellectual into a writer of historical experiences. Although not belonging to the postwar generation, Ye Jung-chong attracted much the attention of the postwar generation both domestic and overseas because of his book, ＂History of the Taiwanese National Movement＂, and because he was part of the ＂back-to-reality＂ trend of thought of the 1970s. Although he was invited to write History of the Taiwanese National Movement as a refutation of Yang Chao-chia's memoirs, it did reveal his strong ＂determination to write history.＂ In the aftermath of World War II, his role as a ＂writer＂ overlapped with his engagement to ＂write history.＂ Ye Jung-chong's zeal to write history stemmed from his demand for equal recognition of the Taiwanese history and culture. His spirit of recording history had set a precedent for the postwar generation, including Kang Ning-hsiang, Huang Huang-hsiung and others. Moreover, every time a predecessor of the anti-Japanese movement died, Ye Jung-chong published essays of commemoration and passed down memories of the forerunners. The 'tangwai' magazines inherited his literary style, which was also a part of his legacy prior to the study of Taiwanese history in the later half of the 1980s. Analyzing the writing activities of Ye Jung-chong in his late years can shed light on the post-colonial cultural movement and the process through which historical experiences of Taiwanese under Japanese colonial rule were discoursed, which makes it a part of social memory under the KMT's dominant, one-party regime in the postwar era.

<p>This contribution reports on experiences made with collaborative writing in the DARIAH consortium (Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and Humanities, www.dariah.eu). DARIAH is a distributed research project involving 12 different European partners; tools supporting various collaborative writing and project coordination tasks have been used over a considerable period of time. Collaboration across geographical distance is essential for this and many other projects, but the existence of conflicting requirements of scholarly collaborative writing processes make a generic solution difficult. Among these requirements are real-time collaborative writing, flexible word-level commenting, footnote support, version control, access rights management, publishing options and open-source availability of the tool itself. Currently available technical solutions do not meet all of these requirements. Tools discussed include Etherpad, Mediawiki/Confluence, GoogleDrive, Dropbox and Wordpress. Finally, one promising solution will be discussed which is still in early stages of development, namely Penflip (www.penflip.com), a GitHub front-end for text composition.</p>

The research topic of this paper centers on the literature written by Taiwan’s Aboriginal women in the 90’s. Two aboriginal women authors Rimui•Aki and Liglave•A-wu were chosen as observing subjects. Focusing on their feminine literature publications after the 90’s this paper aims to compare and contrast their different writing styles on similar topics. The researcher observed different aspects of their writings such as: [childhood background and the creative process], [women’s image and feminism] and [writing style] to examine the similarities and differences on Taiwanese aboriginal women author’s writing on feminine literature hoping that from a women’s perspective the rich and diverse connotations present in aboriginal women’s writing can be shown. This paper is divided into five chapters, chapter one is the introduction then the two authors are discussed independently in the second and third chapters. The fourth chapter compares the two authors. And chapter five concludes. Rimui•Aki and Liglave•A-wu’s writing are built upon their aboriginal ethnic background and their personal experiences living in a tribal society. From their works we not only read about the authors’ life in the mountains but also witness the refined mind of a women. These are distinctive features of aboriginal women’s writing. In Rimui•Aki’s writings we realize that aboriginal women’s literature is not limited to aboriginal culture issues only. From her writings we see very strong self-expression of aboriginal women. Liglave•A-wu’s writings show evidence of discussions about feminine issues. Both women writers have distinctive features in their writings but they both use women’s’ role, feminine issues and mother’s perspective as a theme in their writings. Not only does the two authors find self-assurance through their native cultural roots, but they also investigate their roles as a woman and other women’s role living in an aboriginal tribe. Through these new perspectives the authors bring out a new flavor in aboriginal literature.