wiki

This study was designed to investigate the effects of providing feedback in the interactive environment of wiki on improving the grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing skill as well as the attitudes of Iranian EFL learners’ toward receiving feedback via wiki. To do so, 50 intermediate Iranian EFL learners, who were chosen by an OPT (Oxford Placement Test) participated in this study and they were divided into two groups, experimental and control group. Both groups were given identical writing tasks. In control group, though, the first drafts were reviewed traditionally in a pen and a paper fashion, whereas in the experimental group, they were reviewed by peers through wiki to provide feedback on the grammatical accuracy of writings. The second drafts all were reviewed by the instructor. The results revealed that using wikis to provide feedback on students’ writing can have a significantly positive effect on improving their grammatical accuracy in a writing task. Moreover, the experimental group was found to outperform the control group on the post-test indicating that there was a significant difference between the effects of providing feedback in wiki vs. providing traditional feedback on the grammatical accuracy of Iranian male and female EFL Learners. With regards to the students’ attitude toward using wiki, a majority of the learners welcomed the application of wiki for EFL writing.

With the emergence of new online technologies and computer-mediated language teaching, many recent studies have been conducted on the effectiveness of online peer assessment. The present mixed methods study examined the effect of online peer assessment on Iranian intermediate-level EFL students` writing accuracy. In the quantitative phase of the study, 28 EFL learners studying in an English institute were randomly assigned to two groups and were taught for 14 sessions. The experimental group attended online peer assessment on Wiki as a forum for out-of-classroom discussions regarding English writing, and the control group attended face-to-face peer assessment. To analyze the numerical data collected through a pretest and a posttest, an independent sample t-test was used to investigate the difference between the two group scores before and after the assessments. The results showed that the difference between the posttest means of the experimental group and the control group was significant. Moreover, the results of analyzing the qualitative data, gathered through focus-group interviews, also confirmed the quantitative results, revealing the positive opinions of the interviewees about the role of technology in language learning. Therefore, online peer assessment seems to have benefits that make it worthwhile despite all the difficulties and extra effort of introducing and teaching it to students. The findings may have implications for material designers, language teachers, and language learners.