Fostering EFL College Students' Register Awareness: Writing Online Forum Posts and Traditional Essays

This study explores 19 Taiwanese students’ writing in weekly online forum posts and traditional essays. Results drawn from discourse analysis of students’ writing in both types of writing tasks showed that the semesterlong online writing accompanied by explicit instruction on essays and basic academic writing conventions appeared to help raise EFL students’ consciousness of register in the two writing contexts and help them make appropriate linguistic adjustments. Quantitative analysis using three measures of syntactic complexity revealed that the students tended to use syntactically more complex sentence structures in essays than in online forums. A number of typical informal or online linguistic features characterize the students’ online forums more frequently than in essays. Finally, although most of these EFL college students seemed able to take different approaches to online writing and essay writing at the end of the semester, some students adopted the same rigorous approach to both types of writing as a result of a strategic response to avoid losing face or being misunderstood when writing in a public domain. The results suggest that providing EFL learners a forum where they can express themselves in less formal language is beneficial. DOI: 10.4018/ijcallt.2012070102 18 International Journal of Computer-Assisted Language Learning and Teaching, 2(3), 17-34, July-September 2012 Copyright © 2012, IGI Global. Copying or distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited. ing (e.g., Bloch, 2002; Davis & Thiede, 2000; Fageeh, 2011; Lee, 2010; Miyazoe & Anderson, 2010; Warschauer, 2007), how L2 students have explored the text features displayed in L2 students’ writing in one type or across different types of CMC modes (e.g., Gains, 1999; Gimenez, 2006; Kwásnik & Crowston, 2005; Li, 2000; Fageeh, 2011; Sotillo, 2000), and how L2 learners’ literacy is shaped by online communication (Lam, 2000, 2004; 2009; Lee, 2010). However, little research has yet addressed how English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) students respond to writing tasks involving different registers, in particular, when online writing is incorporated into traditional writing courses. The current study aimed at exploring how EFL students deal with two types of writing tasks—asynchronous online posts and traditional essays—how they perceive the difference between the two writing contexts, and whether they make linguistic adjustments for different types of writing tasks. The results can provide valuable information to EFL writing pedagogy concerning the application and design of CMCrelated writing tasks or activities.