Joint Construction in the SLATE project
Issue: Vol 7 No. 1-3 (2011)
Journal: Linguistics and the Human Sciences
Subject Areas: Writing and Composition Linguistics
Abstract:
This paper concerns pedagogical approaches to literacy implemented in the Scaffolding Literacy in Academic and Tertiary Education (SLATE) project. In particular, this paper focuses on the Joint Construction step of the Teaching Learning Cycle (Rothery & Stenglin 1994; Martin this volume). Through whole-text genre analysis (Martin & Rose 2008), we will describe how the step of Joint Construction was adapted to an online learning context, in order to support the writing development of undergraduate applied linguistics students at the City University of Hong Kong. Our findings highlight that during online Joint Construction lessons, students were given explicit feedback and encouraged to seek clarification, raise queries, recast original contributions and respond to each other’s suggestions. These findings contribute to our understanding of interaction that targets the shared negotiation of meaning, and addresses the on-going challenge of developing pedagogic exchanges which offer explicit and effective support to students’ writing development.
Author: Shoshana Dreyfus, Lucy Macnaught
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