Hassan Soleimani; Alireza Jalilifar; Afsar Rouhi; Mahboubeh Rahmanian
Volume 11, Issue 23 , June 2019, , Pages 327-356
Abstract
The marriage between technology and teaching in educational milieus in recent years has been a major concern among educational researchers in general and applied linguists in particular as far as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are concerned. Augmented reality after virtual reality received ...
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The marriage between technology and teaching in educational milieus in recent years has been a major concern among educational researchers in general and applied linguists in particular as far as augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are concerned. Augmented reality after virtual reality received much attention over the last decades in mobile assisted language learning context. AR mixes virtual world onto real environment, VR delve the participants in to the virtual world. To examine the effect of AR and VR on abstract writing of EFL students, 12 intermediate proficiency pairs (high and low proficiency) participated based on their scores on TOEFL and a hypothetical abstract writing task. The participants were required to write an abstract according to the sub-moves of Hyland's (2000) move analysis provided through three mobile applications including AR-, VR HeadSet virtual reality-, and paper-based scaffoldings for four weeks in a collaborative context. In evaluating the groups' abstract writing scores before and after the treatment, no significant differences were found among the three groups. However, the AR group revealed better mean average results (M = 33) compared to the other VR (M = 24) and paper-based groups (M = 29). Besides, the low intermediate proficiency subjects in the AR group received higher scores (M = 40) compared to heir higher counterpart (M = 37). Results imply that the integration of real and unreal worlds might be a good asset in teaching the genre of abstracts to EFL learners in general and low intermediate proficiency learners in particular.
Parviz Ajideh; Gerhard Leitner; Seyed Yasin Yazdi-Amirkhiz
Volume 8, Issue 17 , July 2016, , Pages 1-24
Abstract
This study purported to comparatively investigate the influence of collaborative writing on the quality of individual writing of four female Iranian and four female Malaysian students. The first semester students at a private university in Malaysia, who were comparable in terms of age, gender, study ...
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This study purported to comparatively investigate the influence of collaborative writing on the quality of individual writing of four female Iranian and four female Malaysian students. The first semester students at a private university in Malaysia, who were comparable in terms of age, gender, study discipline, and language proficiency, were divided into two Iranian and two Malaysian dyads. The dyads performed collaborative writing tasks for 15 sessions; after three consecutive collaborative writing sessions, each participant was asked to individually attempt a writing task. Both collaborative and individual writing tasks comprised isomorphic graphic prompts (IELTS Academic Module task 1). Writing quality of the five individually-produced texts during the study was rated in terms of task achievement (TA), cohesion/coherence (C/C), grammatical range/accuracy (GR/A), and lexical resources (LR). The findings indicated a hierarchy of development in TA and C/C among all the students, while LR showed minor improvement only among three of Malaysian students, and GR/A barely exhibited any progress among everyone. Intermittent progressions and regressions were also discerned in the trajectory of their writing development. The findings are discussed in the light of the socio-cultural and emergentist perspectives, the typology of tasks used as well as the role of the participants’ level of language proficiency.
