A Study On Online Collaborative Learning And Promoting Students' Writing Competence In High School ESL Classroom

Collaborative learning has been widely accepted in education institutes over the world. Recently online collaborative learning has come up with the fast growing computer technology and internet. High school students have showed poor performance in composition section in the National Matriculation English Test. In order to finda new way to enhance English writing skill of high school student. An experiment was carried out in a class of 50 high school students to determine if online collaborative learning could improve their English writing skills. From class` observation,we found students` usage of textbook greatly decreased to 13% of the class time,nearly 50% of the class time was for study collaboratively. From questionnaire result we found studends had more interest to learn English and likely to learn more words and phases through online collaborative learning. A face-to-face interview with students also revealed that 81% of the participants considered that collaborative learning is very important learning approach and 67% of the students admitted that they had improved a lot in English writing.Based on the collaborative learning theory and writing competence theory, this thesis discusses about the infulence and effect of the online collaborative learning to high school students'writing skills through the investigations and experiments. It proves that the online collaborative learning is an efficient English teaching method. It plays a positive role in class and can efficently improve students'writing skills.