Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) As An Instructional Tool For Promoting Non-English Major Students' Involvement In Writing

This dissertation is devoted to discovering the possibilities of utilizing Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) as an instructional tool in English writing and the practical ways to address affective factors in non-English major students'writing with the help of CMC tool– webblog applied in this study.Since the 1970s, the affective variables, which were once regarded as the psychological domain, show their effect on language learning. Among them, attitudes, motivation, anxiety, self-esteem and personality are closely related to the English learning and can be adjusted by the instruction in classroom. Therefore, it deserves considering how the five factors function and how to develop the students'positive affectivity. Modern learning theories, such as constructivist learning, schema theory, interactive & cooperative learning, and autonomous learning, all underlie the application of CMC in English learning especially writing. Writing skills include the features of written language, the writing process and writing strategies (both literal and cognitive strategies). CMC covers a wide range of technologies of writing. Each of these three types of CMC: synchronous (computer-assisted classroom discussion), asynchronous (e-mail exchanges), and hypermedia (Web page creation) has a corresponding use which is most popular in the writing classroom. E-mail, BBS, chat room, ICQ, QQ, MSN, webblog and RSS, wiki are briefly introduced.This thesis investigates the effectiveness of CMC as an instructional tool for promoting non-English major Students'involvement in writing. At first, I create my webblog which is http://szhuo.bokee.com/. After that, all the participants are demanded to log on this website and create their own webblogs through the approach I introduced in my blog. The websites of students'webblogs are recorded in my webblog and subsequently attached to the links of my blog which are attributed to"classmates'blog"group by my edition. One can visit other students'blogs via the link site from my weblog directly. After a semester-long-time blog usage, three kinds of data have been collected in this study: 1. students'blogs of assignment, 2. answers from the questionnaires, 3. opinions in the interviews.This research has shown that, when used as an instructional tool to supplement the traditional classroom, elements of CMC can indeed be beneficial to address students'affective factors in English writing. CMC provides an Internet environment in which students'psychological needs are met. It raises students'motivation,...