Stimulating struggling first-year university students’ writing strategies through observational learning and collaborative writing

The aim of our project is to develop effective writing tutoring for struggling writers at the start of their first year at the university. This presentation will focus on two teaching methods: observational and collaborative writing. In both methods the students’ main focus is on their peers; the teacher has an important coaching function. The main aspect of observational learning is modeling, in which students learn a skill by observing the activities and thoughts of a model (Rijlaarsdam et al. 2008). Hence, writers can focus on their learning process instead of combining the actions of ‘writing’ and ‘learning-to-write’ (Rijlaarsdam 2005). In the workshops, students analyze a video with a strong and a weak writer who think aloud while writing their text, providing an insight into their metacognitive processes. After the observation, students write in groups of two or three, also called co-writing (Saunders 1989) or reactive collaborative writing (Lowry, Curtis & Lowry 2004). The preceding observation gives them the metacognitive framework to discuss their strategies with each other. Both a qualitative and a quantitative study have been carried out to measure the effect of the intervention. The qualitative study indicates that the majority of students perceive the workshops as useful. A one-group quantitative study shows that the texts significantly improve on higher order concerns such as text structure and academic style. We will focus on the design and implementation of both methods and will briefly discuss the effect of the workshops as a whole.status: accepte