This study examined the performance of university foreign language learners on a writing task by comparing paired work (n = 50) against individual work (n = 50). Data were collected based on three aspects of learners' task engagement: behavioural (time spent working on the task, number of words written), linguistic (English writing scores), and…

Communicative language teaching has emerged in second and foreign language pedagogy due to the inadequacy of previous language teaching methods to enhance English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' communicative competence. However, old language teaching methods, mainly, grammar-translation and audio-lingual, are still prevalent in EFL…

While educators value wikis' potential, wikis may fail to support collaborative constructive learning without careful scaffolding. This article proposes literature-based instructional methods, revised based on two expert instructors' input, presents the collected empirical evidence on the effects of these methods and proposes directions for future…

Growing emphasis on research output has spawned initiatives to enhance writing practices, often targeted at groups less familiar with academic research practices. This paper discusses a collaborative writing group project for higher education lecturers working in further education colleges. Participants had previously undertaken funded pedagogic…

Wikis (websites that can be edited quickly by multiple authors) were used with upper-primary school children to write group reports on a science topic. Two teachers observed the children working, and their observations were used alongside the texts from the wikis and group interviews with children to explore the question of whether using wikis…

Google Docs and EtherPad are Web 2.0 tools providing opportunity for multiple users to work online on the same document consecutively or simultaneously. Over the last few years a number of research papers on the use of these collaborative tools in a teaching and learning environment have been published. This work builds on that of Brodahl,…