ONLINE WRITING INSTRUCTION IN EMERGENCY SETTING: EXPLORING THE INSTRUCTIONAL CAPACITY OF DIGITAL SUPPORT

Abstract

Introduction. This paper reports on the results of the initial stage of the study targeted at carrying out a comprehensive comparative research into the educational capacity of two online tools that were used to teach academic writing to university students in the emergency online learning under the COVID-19 pandemic. Since this kind of online educational activity was meaningfully different from well-planned online experiences in terms of planning, preparation, and development, the authors were required to find the tools and online platform to match a range of criteria, such as: accessibility of the tool/platform; high task generation capacity; feedback generation capacity as well as the capacity to disable academic dishonesty. The objective of this paper is to consider the impact of technological support of online writing instruction on the quality of the students’ cause-effect essays as well as on building writing skills of the learners. Methodology. The research is designed as an experimental online training of the 3rd-year students of the Institute of Philology, Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (n=42). Authors 1 and 2 acted as teachers in the process of online writing instruction with the involvement of ZenGengo and PaperRater platforms, which, presumably, adds limitations to this research. Results and discussion. The research results prove a positive impact of the indicated online platforms on improving the overall quality of students’ written products. However, the data obtained show an uneven impact of the platforms on both improving the quality of a written product and the development of students’ integrated writing skills. Language, rhetorical, and textual skills of students were more influenced as opposed to the ability to integrate information from reading/listening sources. The overall conclusion drawn from the research exploration is that only targeted choice of online tools can lead to significant improvement in targeted skills. For online learning to be effective, the tools used in it need to be user-friendly and have a strong potential for optimization in terms of time-consumption and labor-intensiveness. Further prospects for research lie in exploring the educational potential of other platforms as well as investigating the impact of using multimedia tools on other aspects of academic writing