Research On Sakai-based College English Collaborative Writing

Collaborative learning is an effective learning method for students. Sakai, a platform where students and teachers can work collaboratively, provides a chance for collaborative learning to happen.In this paper, the researcher applied collaborative learning based on Sakai to teaching English writing for college students. Students will be organized in groups to participate in the activities performed on Sakai. By doing so, this paper explored if students’ performance on task achievement, cohesion and coherence, lexical resources, grammatical range and accuracy were improved after a semester of learning. This paper investigated students’ attitudes and perceptions towards Sakai-based collaborative writing through a questionnaire and interviews.In this experiment, two classes of non-English majors of Chongqing University participated in this study. All the students were freshmen who showed relatively equal level in the English Placement Test before the classes were divided. The students from the experiment class were specialized in Architecture Environment while the students from the control class majored in Civil Engineering. Quantitative and qualitative methods were combined in this paper. Data were collected from pre and post-tests, which were later analyzed by a series of independent sample t-tests through SPSS2.0 in the aspects of overall evaluation, task achievement, lexical resources, cohesion and coherence, and grammatical range and accuracy. Meanwhile, questionnaire was conducted to investigate students’ perception of utility, satisfaction and motivation, and interviews were conducted to acquire their comments on this learning method, including the advantages, deficiencies, and ways of improvement for Sakai-based collaborative writing.The experiment finds that collaborative writing based on Sakai is beneficial to students to some extent. First, from t-test results of pre and post-tests, the experiment class has significant difference from the control class in the aspect of overall evaluation, task achievement and lexical resources, despite non-significant difference existing in cohesion and coherence, and grammatical range and accuracy. Second, from the analysis of the questionnaire, it can be concluded that the majority of the students held positive attitudes towards Sakai-based collaborative writing. In their perception of utility, most students believed that after participating in collaborative writing on Saki, they could skillfully use a wider range of lexicons with flexibility, and accuracy; they could fully satisfy the requirements of the tasks; they could logically arrange information and ideas, and use cohesion in a natural way that it attracts no attention; they could use a wider range of sentence structures with flexibility and accuracy. Most students held the view that instructions provided by the TA, communications among students themselves contributed to the improvement of their writing ability. In summary, most students consented to the idea that collaborative writing based on Sakai could advance their writing ability. Based on the feedback of the statements on satisfaction, most students clearly satisfied with collaborative writing based on Sakai, and students seemed to even more enjoy the instructions provided by the TA, along with the communications among themselves. From the feedback of the questions on motivation, conclusions can be made that the most of the students were more willing to participate in discussion with their peers and collaborative writing, and they would feel much more motivated in writing English compositions after participating in Sakai-based collaborative writing. Third, from the result of the interviews, it can be concluded that most students believed collaborative writing based on Sakai can be beneficial to their writing for it had several advantages, such as providing a chance for students to learn from each other, stimulating students’ interests in writing. Meanwhile, students raised some constructive criticism about the deficiencies of this learning method, such as restricting their thoughts, lacking in initiatives. Students also provided their opinions on how to improve these deficiencies to make Sakai-based collaborative writing a better learning method.Based on the results of the experiment, this study has discussed the advantages and deficiencies of Sakai-based collaborative writing, and suggestions for ways of improving collaborative writing based on Sakai have been raised. The writer would hope that this paper will give some enlightenment in the aspects of instruction, teaching activity organization, simulation of students’ interests, ect. to teachers and researchers and thus help the students to improve their English writing abilities.