Presentation
Online Writing Laboratories: Their Potential in Southern African Education
Andrew van der Spuy and Fiona Cameron-Brown, WritingLab SA.
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| Paper (8 pages) |
Students at academic institutions are expected to produce well-written assignments, containing sophisticated analysis and argument. This assumes that students at tertiary level have mastered the skill of writing. Regrettably, this is generally not the case: few courses other than language courses facilitate the development of skills that help learners to articulate ideas and arguments through logical, coherent writing.
It is because the reality falls short of the underlying assumption that writing courses have become mandatory in the US undergraduate curriculum. On-campus writing centres are expected to provide such courses, and to offer additional support to students. However, because of limited resources, these centres are often restricted in terms of the quantity (and quality) of support they offer. Consequently, every major university in the US also has an online writing laboratory, providing asynchronous writing tutorials for students. Online writing tutoring must apply the same techniques that are used in any coaching or mentoring interaction — putting the learner at ease and providing constructive support that foregrounds students’ texts, unlike the mediated relationships between tutor and student.
The presenters of this paper are members of a group of South African graduate educators who have trained as online writing tutors and worked for US-based education institutions. The paper explains how virtual writing laboratories work, in the context of the process theory and genre theory approaches to writing, and how they could be used to benefit Southern African students. It also demonstrates the positive results of this type of support by examining examples of students' submissions to online writing laboratories, and showing how the students’ writing improved.