Collaborative Academic Acculturation Processes in a Blended-Learning Approach
1. General introduction
University of Antwerp, Belgium
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Honolulu, HI, USA
Collaborative Academic Acculturation
To become a successful member of the academic community, students must be or become academically literate –that is, they must develop the skills to communi- cate and function with ease in an academic environment (cf. Boughey 2000: 281;
Hyland 2006, 2009: ix). Becoming academically literate is a cumulative process in which reading, writing, critical thinking and self-management, among other skills, need to be gradually learned and repetitively practiced. Academic writing, in particular, plays a critical role in attaining and demonstrating academic literacy, and is an area where students frequently struggle, with a high risk for failure (e.g., Johns 1997; Howes 1999; Street 1999; Snow 2005; Hyland 2006).
Even though academic literacy is ‘foreign’ for all young students (Van de Poel/
Van Dyk 2015), it is even more so for second or foreign language (L2) learners.
These students face not only a new kind of discourse, i.e. academic discourse, but also have to approach it in a language they are still in the process of learning.
As the HE student population becomes increasingly diverse, HE classrooms are increasingly filled with individuals at different stages of academic language profi- ciency, and with different learning preferences, paths, routes and routines. In this situation, we suggest, an autonomous approach to language learning may be the most effective and efficient for students. In other words, we suggest that learners can and should be encouraged to take control of planning, monitoring and evalu- ating the learning process and outcome and show willingness and motivation to initiate and regulate their learning (Little 2004; Nguyen/Gu 2013; Murray 2014).
However, because (L2) learners in HE are not always ready to take up the responsibility for their own learning –in other words, they are not fully autono- mous and often wish to hear the ‘authoritative’ voice of a tutor or lecturer– it is important to provide support systems for them that facilitate taking ownership of their learning (cf. Stracke 2007). More specifically, we may need to make them aware of the impact they can have on their own learning by showing them a range of ways toward becoming-at a minimum-co-owners of that process.
To this end, for L2 students, foreign language interaction can be regarded as an opportunity to collaborate in solving their language-related problems, scaffold each other, and co-construct new language knowledge (cf. Donato 1994; Ohta/
Foster 2005; Swain 2000; Luzzatto/Di Marco 2010). If students are to develop this knowledge and skill set with respect to academic language norms and use, these opportunities should be embedded in an academic context. Collaboration, then, has the potential to play an important role in academic acculturation (although see Colpaert/Gijsen (this volume) for a critical review of collaborative learning).
In this article we will focus specifically on peer collaboration, and how it can lower the (perceived) threshold for students’ engagement with the requirements of the
academic setting. In this, we extend work by Dobao (2014: 498), which examined the opportunities that pair and small-group task-based interaction offer for peer collaboration and L2 vocabulary learning, to academic literacy more broadly (i.e., both reading and writing). In doing so, we argue that in HE settings, learn- ers can and should be active participants in their own learning, as well as their peers’ (cf. Barkley 2014: 4).
Given the limited contact hours in university courses, it is not always possible to provide students with extensive opportunities for peer collaboration along with teaching required curriculum content in the classroom alone. Rather, new routes have to be found. This article will report on the efforts undertaken to make an academic writing course for first-and second-year English majors (L2) more effective through the use of a blended learning approach, combining online and face-to-face interaction in which students were explicitly guided to work collaboratively.
A blended learning approach can be a compelling option when course pro- grammes suffer from being overloaded, student numbers are high, staff hours are being reduced, or the student population is highly heterogeneous and there is a need to cater to a diverse set of learning needs. A blended approach “combine[s]
face-to-face instruction with computer-mediated instruction” (Graham 2006: 5). In this, students experience a combination of lecturer-directed classroom interaction and self-guided online learning and (in our case, peer) interaction. To the extent that students decide on their own learning route and content while engaging with the online component, this approach is generally regarded as having a positive im- pact on the learners’ autonomy (Little 1991). Provided that the computer-mediated component is not just a mirror copy of or ‘data dump’ of in-class content, the ap- proach can turn learners into co-owners of the teaching and learning process in a true constructivist spirit (Van de Poel/Fourie 2013). Since the blended context provides an opportunity for interaction and collaboration which class sizes may not cater for, blended learning has the potential to allow more intense social and academic networking than might otherwise be possible. Ideally, this should give participants opportunities to co-construct more mature cohesive reasoning pat- terns (cf. Reuven et al. 2003) through which they are able to reach “a high level of critical thinking” (Laat et al. 2007: 90).
In what follows, we discuss how collaboration in an online environment was integrated into first-and second-year academic writing courses at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). The initiative was aimed at giving the learners the oppor- tunity to exchange ideas with fellow students preparatory to and as an integral part of a number of writing assignments and to reflect on the course content as
well as to inform their personal learning trajectory through peer collaboration and peer review. We will first discuss how instructors incorporated the assignments and instructions into the existing courses and created an informed blend. We will then present and discuss data on students’ reactions to this collaborative aspect of both courses, highlighting their implications for collaborative language course design and how it can support students’ academic acculturation.