Using Etherpad for Online Collaborative Writing Activities and Learners with Different Language Learning Strategies

The current study is a research on use of EtherPad platform for online collaborative writing tasks. There are lots of reports and research dealing with these platforms, the integration of technology and its use for online educational purposes. Many of them showed that online education is very new for the learners and there is little contribution to their learning process in terms of changing their traditional educational behaviors. Furthermore, the teachers are still focusing on using technology for their own sake but there is very little attention on in-class or out-class activities since most of the time, their in-service training including appropriate technological tools, syllabus integration and consultation are disregarded. It seems that there's very little interest on synchronous collaborative online writing by the language learners with different language learning strategies. Therefore, this study investigates how the learners with different language learning strategies behave in online platforms while they are using online materials and particularly writing over EtherPad. Voluntary participants could easily integrate into online platforms and spent remarkable effort and time to cooperate and complete all given tasks and especially synchronous online collaborated writing tasks. As a result of the research, it was observed that performance of two groups of participants with different language learning strategies have significantly differentiated, which suggested that such online writing activities can be implemented to diagnose such differences among the learners and be useful to manipulate their learning process in order to assist them to improve their certain learning skills and motivate them according to their needs.

Keywords:

online learning, synchronous learning language learning strategies, online collaborative writing,

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