It aims to describe how the course wiki was used to teach writing for academic and professional purposes, and to analyse what impact using the wiki had on the writer–reader relationship. The case study employed several research techniques, including participant observation, text analysis and a self-report questionnaire. The texts published by students on the wiki were examined for reader-oriented features and interactional metadiscourse resources. The results indicate that using the wiki for writing activities made students pay close attention to grammatical correctness and structural coherence.
Over a period of two months, as an integral part of their ESL homework, groups of students designed and put together, through a series of successive drafts, a description of their secondary school which they had joined from primary school a few months previously.
A research study which used the tools of functional linguistics to illuminate the writing requirements of the history curriculum in the context of Australian secondary schools. It shows how the resulting linguistic description was integrated into a sequence of teaching and learning activities through collaboration between linguist specialists and content/pedagogic specialists. These activities were designed to facilitate students’ writing skills whilst simultaneously developing their historical knowledge.