Meaningful and enjoyable writing tasks in an academic writing workshop through observation of peers

In our presentation on task design we will discuss two specific writing tasks in a series of writing workshops at the KU Leuven. The workshops take place in the first weeks of the academic year and are aimed at linguistically weak students. The two tasks, an observational learning task followed by a collaborative writing task, focus on writing strategy development of weak writers. In both methods the students’ main focus is on their peers; the teacher has an important coaching function. To create a meaningful but feasible writing assignment in this early stage of the students’ academic career, the tasks were based on an essential skill: to synthesise (visual) information into a text. However, before they had to write, the students observed a video of two of their peers. In our lecture we will show how the screen-capture software Camtasia is used to produce these videos. Observational learning was developed by Albert Bandura and later on applied in broader domains such as writing instruction (Rijlaarsdam et al. 2008, Raedts et al. 2009). Its main aspect is modeling in which students learn a skill by observing the activities of a model (Raedts et al. 2009). Important is that not only the models’ actions, but also their underlying thought patterns are made explicit. This way, weak writers can focus on their learning process instead of combining the actions of ‘writing’ and ‘learning-to-write’ (Rijlaarsdam 2005, Rijlaarsdam et al. 2008). Moreover, it stimulates the self-efficacy beliefs of the writers (Schunk & Zimmerman 2007), which makes the task more enjoyable. After the observation, students write a similar text in groups of two or three. This is called co-writing (Saunders 1989) or reactive collaborative writing (Lowry, Curtis & Lowry 2004). It forces them to explicitly state their strategies to each other. The preceding observation makes sure that students have the correct metacognitive framework to do so. Both a qualitative and a quantitative study have been carried out to measure the effectiveness of the intervention. The qualitative study, an online questionnaire four months after the intervention, indicates that the majority of students perceive the workshops as useful for their writing practice. A one-group quantitative study in which the quality of students’ texts was rated, shows that the 32 students that participated significantly improved on four higher order text concerns: ‘text coherence’, ‘paragraph structure’, ‘neutral style’ and ‘impersonal style’. Due to the one group design, no generalizable inferences can be made. However, the developers of the language coaching program can deduce essential information about the short-term evolution in the quality of the writing products of this specific group. To conclude, observational learning helps weaker university students to develop their writing strategies in a natural and enjoyable manner that does not lead to a cognitive overload. Moreover, the combination of the observation with collaborative writing tries to entrench the acquired strategies in an effective way. In our presentation we will focus on the design and implementation of both tasks in writing classes.status: publishe