Exploring wiki-based collaborative writing activities among ESL pre-service education students

This pilot study was conducted to explore how English as Second Language (ESL) pre-service education students interact online when engaging in collaborative writing tasks on a wiki platform. The aim of the study was to establish how the integration of wiki based collaborative writing activities in ESL course helped to promote students’ writing skills. The study was purely qualitative and it employed case study design. A total of 48 ESL pre-service education students at one university in Uganda working in groups of 8 participated in an eight-week study. Students’ wiki pages and history tracking system were analysed to establish the role of students’ engagement in peer edits as well as form and meaning-related revisions. In addition, focus group interviews were conducted to find out students’ experiences of wiki-based collaborative writing activities. Results indicated that while there were variations in the way students collaborated in the wiki-based collaborative writing activities, with some groups exhibiting high numbers of peer-edits, form and meaning-related changes and others very low numbers of peer-corrections, students reported that these activities helped them to generate, organise and express ideas in writing accurately and meaningfully. The results also suggested that students concentrated more on meaning-related revisions than form-related edits. Finally, students’ experiences of using wikis in ESL writing were positive and they believed that working collaboratively on a wiki platform helped them perform better in writing. This study recommended that due consideration should be given to the selection of topics that will elicit student engagement in terms of creativity in language usage and sharing of own ideas in the main research.