Teacher-student interaction on wikis : fostering collaborative learning and writing

Wikis are widely considered to be student-centred platforms which promote collaborative learning. Previous research has, however, demonstrated that without teacher intervention some students fail to engage with one another collaboratively in these environments. This study contributes to the emerging literature on the role of teachers in supporting collaborative learning during wiki activities by examining teacher and student online interaction during wiki-mediated collaborative writing activities in three Kuwaiti high school English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classes. Teacher and student discussion posts and text edits during the eight-week projects were analysed using a discourse analysis framework and triangulated with data from semi-structured interviews. The findings revealed that the approaches adopted by the teachers in this study ranged from directive to dialogic. Where the teachers took a more directive approach, students tended to interact with the teacher rather than with the peers and wrote by themselves individually. Where the teachers adopted a more dialogic approach, however, there was greater student-to-student interaction and collaboration leading to jointly constructed texts. Such findings point to the benefits of adopting a dialogic approach to teaching during wiki-mediated collaborative writing activities.