Student-initiated Attention to Form in Wiki-based Collaborative Writing

Greg Kessler Ohio University This study reports on student initiated attention to form within the collaborative construction of a wiki among pre-service Non-Native Speaker (NNS) English teachers. Forty NNS pre-service teachers from a large Mexican university were observed over a period of a sixteen week semester in an online content-based course aimed at improving their language skills while studying about the cultures of the English-speaking world. A core element of the course was a wiki that was collaboratively created, developed, and revised throughout the course. Students were encouraged to focus on language accuracy while actively participating and interacting with their peers in varied ways. This article explores the degree to which these NNS EFL teacher candidates attempt to correct their own and others’ grammar errors in a long-term collaborative task. The article also addresses the level of accuracy these participants achieve and the attention they pay to grammar revision versus content revision. Follow-up interviews with participants provided insight into the perception of the importance of grammar in the context of collaborative technologies among these NNS pre-service teachers.