As the importance of online collaborative writing is recognized as an effective teaching strategy, studies have investigated how factors such as gender, ability, and group size affect learners' collaboration. However, few studies have explored the effects of group formation, i.e., student-chosen groups (SCGs) and teacher-assigned groups (TAGs) in…

For faculty members, writing is often the task that is perpetually set aside due to demands of teaching and service in a university setting. Faculty writing groups are one way to encourage commitment, consistency, and support for a successful writing agenda. The purpose of this article is to illustrate one successful example of a thriving virtual…

Knowledge building occurs when students work together and participate in idea-centred discussions where they share information and create knowledge collectively. This research explores whether knowledge building in knowledge forums using English as the "lingua franca" can facilitate in foreign language learning. An analysis was done on…

The use of social annotation tools in higher education has attracted the attention of researchers with many studies having looked at student perceptions and attitudes to them. This paper investigates students' activity and perceptions of the social annotation tool Diigo along with the extent to which they correlate with their approaches to…

The present mixed-methods study aimed at investigating the effects of three writing conditions, including collaborative writing (CW), collaborative prewriting (CPW), and individual writing (IW), on the performance and motivation of 66 Iranian EFL learners in a computer-mediated communication (CMC) context. Data were obtained through a background…

Background: Online Collaborative Writing (OCW) has been reported to be useful to improve writing quality in higher education. However, challenges emerge during the collaborative processes, mainly centering on how to sustain active interactions and communications in order to complete a high quality of writing. Objectives: Using the design-based…

Despite the solid evidence that online collaborative writing (CW) tasks benefit language learning, little is known about whether the computer-mediated communication (CMC) modality may impact the potential of online CW tasks in foreign language classrooms. This study examined the effect of task modality on the utility of CW tasks in language…

The present article examines collaborative writing in organizational consulting and training, where writing takes place as part of a group discussion assignment and is carried out by using digital writing technologies. In the training, the groups use digital tablets as their writing device in order to document their answers in the shared digital…

Among other technologies, wikis, as a Web 2.0 technology, have been found to support online collaborative behaviour of students in group work. Despite the intention-behaviour relationship expected in many relevant theories, studies have found that the relationship between students' intention to use wikis and their behaviour in using wikis was not…

Background: 'Snack writing' is a term coined to describe regular short bursts of writing on a larger academic writing task. There is extensive research on academic writing, but research on 'snack writing' is limited. Moreover, the idea of 'snack writing' in an online environment is not evident in the literature. Objectives: The study objectives…

The aim of this study was to identify process-related indicators for grading group essays. The research participants were students registered in a teacher-training course using an instructional design with face-to-face and digital blended learning. The course required the students in small collaborative groups to design, implement, and evaluate a…

In recent decades, web-based collaborative writing has become popular as a technical technique for improving collaboration. The study explored the effect of Google-mediated collaborative writing (henceforth GMCW) and face-to-face collaborative writing (henceforth FTFCW) on developing English as a Second Language (henceforth ESL) students' global…

Despite the positive claims on the pedagogical use of social annotation and online collaborative writing tools discussed in the literature, most of the findings are derived from interviews or self-reported survey data. Very few studies probed deep into the learning processes and examined students' digital traces and the artefacts they…

While much research supports the benefits of computer-mediated collaborative writing (CW) in second language (L2) classrooms, the assessment of CW has received scant attention. This study proposed an assessment scheme considering both the products and processes when assessing online synchronous CW, and explored its effects on learners'…

Although the potential of group awareness (GA) tools on triggering student engagement has been recognized in literature, little is known about the effects of GA tools on student engagement with peer feedback in the context of online collaborative language learning. This quasi-experimental study with 86 college students explored how GA tools…