The Effects Of Wiki-based Collaborative Writing Instruction On The Performance Of Non-english Majors

As an important part of English teaching, writing instruction greatly influences other stages of teaching,such as, listening, speaking and reading, and which plays important roles for improving writing competence ofEnglish learners. Therefore, it can’t be ignored by English teachers in the process of instruction. With thedevelopment of society and widely application of information technology, traditional approaches of writinginstruction have revealed its shortcomings that can’t meet students’ needs. Meanwhile, the new College EnglishCurriculum Requirements (CECR)(2007) is issued by Department of Higher Education requires that teachersshould fully use modern information technology, adopt a new computer and classroom-based teaching modeland fully take the advantages of networks in the field of teaching to realize the purpose of networking,autonomous and personalized college English instruction. Wiki as a new product of online age has met the needsof information society and students’ actual writing, and what is social writing platform with its shared, creativeand collaborative benefits have brought many opportunities for integration between computer technologies andEFL instruction.With the advantages of wiki technology, this research try to apply wiki-based collaborative platform intonon-English majors’ writing instruction to explore its effects on cultivating students’ interaction, participationand involvement in the process of writing and improving learners’ writing competence.Vygotsky’s social constructivism and Rogers’s humanistic psychology are considered to be the theoreticalfoundation of this thesis, which is an empirical study on non-English majors’ writing competence. This paperstudied from two dimensions and what is the writing quality of the composition and perceptions of subjects,among which the writing quality of the composition includes the scores of pre-test and post-test and accuracy,complexity and fluency of writing.The research methods of this thesis are both qualitative and quantitative, and the instruments of datacollection are tests and interviews; and participants come from two intact classes enrolled in the year of2011atfaculty of law in Gansu Institute of Political Science and Law. One is an experimental class subjected bywiki-based collaborative writing instruction, one is a control class implemented by traditional writing instruction.Lastly, the researcher adopts independent samples T-test and paired samples T-test by SPSS13.0and interviewsten students after this experiment from which the author reaches the following conclusions.The approach of wiki-based collaborative instruction greatly improves the competence of non-Englishmajors’ writing. The results show that experimental class has made obvious progress on accuracy and complexity, but it is not significant on accuracy. For interview, all interviewees believe that wiki-basedcollaborative writing instruction greatly stimulate subjects’ initiative and promote their involvement; severalinterviewees hold the opinions that the method of wiki-based collaborative writing instruction is not obviouslyfor improving the competence of students’ writing. One important reason is that there exist some operationaldifficulties on wiki-based collaborative writing.Because of the limited time on wiki writing, small samples and insufficient ability of the researcher, thereexisting some shortcomings. But this research has provided some new ideas for college English instruction withsome implications for teaching in the hope of providing guidance for learners’ writing and teachers’ instruction.