Chris Harwood

This chapter explores the design and deployment of online writing centers (OWCs) to cater to the evolving needs of diverse undergraduate and graduate student populations. Leveraging platforms such as ZOOM, OWCs provide effective writing support, especially for individuals facing challenges with in-person services. The chapter discusses the historical integration of technology in writing centers, writing center pedagogy, and highlights ZOOM's pedagogical benefits. It also emphasizes the significance of webforms for streamlining administrative processes and supporting self-regulated learning. Insights regarding how to engage students in writing consultations are discussed alongside the evaluation of the effectiveness of OWCs in beta testing. The purpose of the chapter is to empower educators in establishing OWCs in their contexts, which are tailored to promote accessibility and effective online learning for their students.

This paper explores the technological affordances of using Zoom for pedagogical purposes in the context of one-to-one writing center tutorials. First, the theoretical pedagogical framework that informs writing center tutorials is explained and the salient mediating affordances of Zoom technology are outlined. Then, tutor and student qualitative feedback from the beta testing of a virtual writing center hosted in Zoom are presented and briefly discussed. The feedback suggests that Zoom has a range of technological affordances that can be employed by educators to host and conduct meaningful writing center tutorials in an undergraduate EMI context.

This chapter focuses on cooperative learning in an undergraduate English for academic purposes context and discusses the pedagogical factors that educators should consider when moving a face-to-face cooperative learning activity online. In the discussion, a text-based academic literacy activity is used to illustrate how the principles of cooperative learning should incorporate pedagogic concepts and approaches from group-based online learning to facilitate cooperative learning online. Factors within task structure, and the importance of teaching presence and social presence in fostering cognitive presence in an online learning environment are discussed. Then, recommendations for how to cultivate positive interdependence, promotive interaction, individual accountability, interpersonal and small group skills, and group processing in online activities are proposed.

Reflective practice has long been considered an important part of professional development for educators; however, accounts of utilizing reflective practice with groups of experienced teachers remain scarce. We consider reflective practice to be an important means of fostering professional discourse among experienced teachers regarding their pedagogical beliefs and practices. To that end, this paper describes a reflective practice innovation introduced in an undergraduate English composition program in a Japanese university. In what follows we, as experienced teachers, detail how a reflective-practice routine (RPR) was established and used to evaluate the efficacy of existing curricular materials to inform adjunct-faculty onboarding and professional development. In closing, we make several recommendations related to scheduling, maintaining focused and constructive interactions when implementing an RPR, and we provide examples of how the results of the RPR were applied to improve our onboarding process, teaching practices, and course materials.

This chapter presents a multi-method qualitative study of an active blended learning (ABL) activity in an undergraduate English for academic purposes program at a North American university. The purpose of the study was to understand how instructors facilitated ABL in five online book clubs. The community of inquiry (CoI) framework is used to analyze the comments and posts in the book clubs. This data is discussed with data from interviews with three case study students and four book club instructors and data from a CoI student survey. The findings indicate that instructor book selection, questions, scaffolding strategies, modelling, and manner significantly mediated student perceptions regarding their engagement, participation, and interaction in the ABL activity, specifically whether students scaffolded each other's learning, read extensively, and practised academic reading strategies. Implications of how instructor pedagogy mediated student perceptions about their participation and learning in the ABL activity are then presented.

The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted traditional approaches to education and forced educators to adopt and adapt technologies to allow institutions to remain open, offer courses and other services to enable students to continue their education. This rapid shift to online teaching and learning has shone a light on the need for institutions to support students in working out how to maintain autonomy through meaningful interaction in the online world. In this paper we discuss the transition of a face-to-face university writing center to a synchronous online writing center that is hosted in the videoconferencing application Zoom. In doing this we explain the rationale that informed our thinking throughout the transition process and how sound pedagogical principles and a focus on the student experience guided our decision-making. Preliminary findings regarding how self-regulated learning was maintained and nurtured in the virtual writing center are presented and discussed.

The discussed study specifically investigates how instructors appropriated different aspects of this technology’s user interface to support their pedagogical practices from a human-computer interaction perspective. The study considers instructor and student experiences and their perceptions of these blended learning experiences within two English for academic purposes courses that were offered through the University of Toronto. Data illustrate how students participated through this technology to support their learning of academic English even though Facebook Groups had not been designed to support learning. This study indicates how aspects of the technology mediate student-learning activities and it illustrates how this social media tool can be used to support student literacy activities within formal learning environments. Suggestions for better facilitating literacy activities through this tool are provided.

Informed by sociocultural theory this study presents insights gained through qualitative study of an undergraduate literacy activity in a North American university that used Facebook Groups to host student online book clubs. Data from student and instructor interviews and online collaborative writing interactions from a 24-week empirical study of the interactions and activities within the online book clubs are used to demonstrate how teaching and learning was perceived and enacted in the online activity. Excerpts from the interviews and online interactions illustrate how learning was mediated between instructors, between instructors and students, and between students on the program. The analysis reveals possible tensions these dialogic interactions can create and informs our understanding of how online educators are also positioned as learners, endeavoring to understand the repercussions of their online interactions and teaching practices. This paper adds to this emerging literature employing the concept of obuchenie by examining how particular affordances and constraints of teaching and learning unfold in an authentic online learning context.

This article discusses the effects of Hong Kong’s language policy changes in education since China reclaimed the territory in 1997. It describes Hong Kongers’ perceptions of English and their mother tongue Cantonese, and considers the effects of the Cantonese medium of instruction (CMI) policy, which was introduced to promote biliteracy and trilingualism 1 among Hong Kongers. The analysis shows that even though CMI results in deeper learning in Hong Kong students, the strength and status of English as the lingua franca in the territory remains strong, and access to the linguistic capital English brings remains restricted to those with financial capital to afford it.

In 2014 a literacy activity that used Facebook Groups to host student online book clubs was introduced into the curriculum of a 24 week EAP program at a major Canadian university. Informed by sociocultural theory this thesis presents insights gained through a multi-method qualitative study of the book clubs and their participants over the course of the program.

This paper discusses politeness theory and research and considers how politeness is expressed and interpreted in computer-mediated communication (CMC) in EMI university contexts.

This paper briefly explores article use in English and explains why different nouns use different articles and how the meaning of a phrase can be modified by article use. The paper then focuses on the implications and challenges of article use for Japanese L2 learners. In order to do this, aspects of the Japanese language are briefly considered, and first language (L1) interference is discussed as a factor in the acquisition and use of articles by Japanese users of English.

In this paper we consider online teaching and learning from a constructivist pedagogic perspective and illustrate how learning theory connects to teaching practice in online contexts. To do this we employ an Ontario Media Studies grade 11 course unit to explain how Google Drive applications provide the necessary tools to facilitate constructivist online learning. The media studies unit is a culmination of years of iterations and reflection on the delivery and efficacy of media lessons online.

This article discusses the effects of Hong Kong's language policy changes in education since China reclaimed the territory in 1997. It describes Hong Kongers' perceptions of English and their mother tongue Cantonese, and considers the effects of the Cantonese medium of instruction (CMI) policy, which was introduced to promote biliteracy and trilingualism(1) among Hong Kongers. The analysis shows that even though CMI results in deeper learning in Hong Kong students, the strength and status of English as the lingua franca in the territory remains strong, and access to the linguistic capital English brings remains restricted to those with financial capital to afford it.

This article reports on how the online curation software platform SymbalooEDU was used to support undergraduate and postgraduate learners of English for Academic Purposes (EAP). The pedagogical theories behind personal learning environments (PLEs) are reviewed and then considered in the interpretation of data from two student surveys – a needs analysis of student’s E-learning preferences, and a feedback survey about student perceptions and experiences of using SymbalooEDU to support their academic English learning.

This paper reports on the use of Facebook for educational purposes in two different university communication courses.

This paper givesan overview of pedagogical blogging and discusses the way it was implementedin two university courses. It also proposes that because students and their teacher facilitators develop and share common interests and goals, they evolve into what Lave and Wenger (1991) have termed a “community of practice” (CoP). Following that, the paper explains how blogging in these two course CoPs extended teaching and learning out of the classroom into a class-centered “blogosphere.”

This paper reports on the pedagogic reasons for using blogs as a learning aid and how blogging was integrated into a curriculum at the National University of Singapore to supportthe learning of grammar editing skills of music students.

This dissertation investigates the effects of the KET speaking component onthe teaching and learning (washback) of speaking skills at a private Japanesehigh school. Using qualitative research the perceptions and attitudes of theparticipants in the washback process are established and the effects of their actions are analysed. The study primarily seeks to discover what negative washback from the test exists at the school, before looking at validity issues within the test itself and the educational decisions of the stake holders involved.