359 / 2019-12-29 12:31:39

Fostering academic writing skills through teacher student collaborative assessment (TSCA) in a blended EFL academic writing course

teacher student collaborative assessment, blended learning, academic writing

专门用途英语 > 专门用途英语

Teacher-student collaborative assessment (TSCA), a new model of assessment in Production-oriented Approach (Wen 2016; 2018), involves teacher and students’ collaboration in evaluating students’ writing samples and is divided into pre-class, in-class and after-class phases. The present study examines the integration of TSCA in a blended EFL academic writing course, to answer three questions:

1. How could TSCA be integrated in a blended teaching context?


2. How effective is TSCA in improving students’ academic writing skills?


3. What are students’ perceptions of TSCA?

We undertook the study in the naturalistic context of an academic writing course targeted for 30 Chinese learners with intermediate English language proficiency in a key university in Beijing. The course was divided into six teaching cycles, focusing respectively on the title, introduction, method, results, discussion and abstract of a biomedical paper. In each cycle, students were required to produce the corresponding part reporting their own research project after an online autonomous learning session of reading materials and PPT on generic structure and linguistic features, and on-site session of journal sample reading. Students’ writing samples in each cycle were evaluated with TSCA. Multiple sources of data collection were employed, including students’ writing products, a questionnaire on student perceptions, in-class observations, student and teacher reflective journals and interviews.

The results revealed TSCA improved learners’ academic writing skills, in terms of applying the appropriate generic structure and linguistic formality. The participants expressed positive attitudes towards TSCA, especially the in-class session. The study proposes refinement of TSCA in the blended learning context.