British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 44 No 3 2013 E77–E80

doi:10.1111/j.1467-8535.2012.01344.x

Colloquium

A Web-based EFL writing environment as a bridge between academic

advisers and junior researchers: A pilot study

Barry Lee Reynolds

Address for correspondence: Mr Barry Lee Reynolds, National Central University, Graduate Institute of Learning &
Instruction, no. 300, Jhongda Rd., Jhongli City, Taoyuan County 32001, Taiwan. Email: barry@cl.ncu.edu.tw

Introduction
In the age of “publish or perish,” publishing academic journal articles is a must not only for
professors but also for graduate students in Taiwan. Increasingly, Taiwanese research universities
are requiring masters and PhD students to write theses and dissertations in English, with an
added caveat for PhD students to publish two or more articles in high-impact factor English
language journals. Non-Anglophone writers, especially first-language Chinese speakers, consider
themselves to be at a disadvantage for a number of reasons (Flowerdew, 1999). Research has
shown one source of the difficulty lies in not being a part of the discourse community for which
they are required to write (Flowerdew, 2000); furthermore, a lack of both content schemata
(Carrell & Eisterhold, 1983) and the practice of writing beyond the sentence level (Mohan & Lo,
1985) leave many junior researchers feeling that they will never enjoy a level playing field when
writing articles for publication. Professors that have received higher education in a country
where English is the lingua franca may have benefited from a mentor–mentee relationship with
their academic advisers and thus be able to provide a similar relationship for their advisees
(Flowerdew, 1999). Nevertheless, professors’ attempts at providing such a relationship are not
always feasible in Taiwan, leaving many junior researchers struggling to meet graduation
requirements. It is more common for academic advisers to restrict feedback to the marking of
drafts, but because of the time necessary for marking written work, advisers often simply high-
light incorrect turns of phrase while advisees reviewing their writing have difficulties recalling
why they made those particular errors.
As a possible solution, IWiLL 2.0 (http://cube.iwillnow.org/IWiLL/), a Web-based writing plat-
form designed to aid teachers in providing electronic feedback on student writing, was used by an
academic adviser to provide writing feedback to graduate students enrolled in an academic
reading/writing course offered through a university English self-learning center.

Methodology
An English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teacher and an academic adviser from the same Taiwanese
university cooperated in the teaching of a blended course targeting graduate students (n = 11)
who had previously encountered difficulty with scholarly writing. Both the academic adviser and
the EFL teacher used IWiLL 2.0 to provide feedback and communicate with students, while the EFL
teacher also used the IWiLL platform for instruction. The EFL teacher guided students in the
narrow reading of 20 “core” scholarly articles selected by the adviser from the students’ future area
of expertise (Industrial Management) and also taught text structure, a method found to positively
facilitate ESL reading comprehension (Carrell, 1985). At the end of the 3-month course, a
face-to-face interview was conducted with the adviser, and students were administered an online
anonymous questionnaire containing both open- and closed-ended questions.
© 2013 The Author. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2013 BERA. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford
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E78 British Journal of Educational Technology Vol 44 No 3 2013

Figure 1: IWiLL 2.0 teacher’s interface for marking student writing

IWiLL 2.0
IWiLL 2.0, the updated version of IWiLL 1.0 (Wible, Kuo, Tsao & Liu, 2001), encapsulates a
myriad of functions relevant to students, teachers and researchers. The features of most interest
to this study are the teacher’s interface for marking student essays and the teacher’s comment
bank. The comment bank is a personalized bank of grammatical, stylistic or other written feed-
back types input by the teacher and stored in one’s user profile to be retrieved and appended to
student writing when providing feedback. Unlike other electronic platforms that allow teachers to
provide feedback on student writing, the comment bank improves with use. For example, if a
teacher encounters a stylistic error and recalls previously providing feedback on such an error,
there is no need to key in the same feedback. The teacher simply retrieves the previous comment
from the bank, highlights the error in the student essay and appends the comment. If the error in
question requires a slightly different comment than the one given previously, additional informa-
tion can be added, and the teacher has the choice to save the updated comment or simply append
without saving. Students will have access to these comments when revising their subsequent
drafts that will be linked together in both the teacher and student interface. Furthermore, unlike
the pitfalls encountered when providing electronic feedback dependent on word processing pro-
grams (see Denton, Madden, Roberts & Rowe, 2008), IWiLL 2.0 allows teachers the option of
sharing a portion or their entire comment bank with other teachers. In addition, all annotations
as well as the highlighted errors in students’ writing are indexed, which allows for future execu-
tion of individual or group cumulative profiling (Figure 1).

Preliminary results
Adviser’s reactions
The adviser stated that the system provided more opportunities to interact with advisees regard-
ing writing than the previous semester when instruction was given only during weekly research
meetings. The turnaround time for drafts was faster than before with advisees also adhering more
to advice. The adviser used the system more for providing what he referred to as “stylistic errors”
than grammatical errors and found himself highlighting the same problem for multiple students,
© 2013 The Author. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2013 BERA.
 Colloquium E79

which was easier to accomplish; thanks to the comment bank. He also found it useful knowing
what papers advisees had read; he often linked advisees to specific journal article passages as
examples when providing feedback. The adviser also mentioned that it was helpful to have access
to advisees’ multiple drafts but wished IWiLL provided a feature allowing a simultaneous
“merged” view of all drafts; this would provide a cumulative view of all changes made to a single
manuscript.

Students’ reactions
Overall, students reported enjoying receiving feedback through IWiLL, with the most common
comment being that electronic feedback is much easier to read than handwritten feedback; this
supports the result reported by Denton et al (2008). For example, one student noted, “[This class]
was very helpful. The teacher taught us the tips for the structure of the articles. It definitely helped
my writing. When I made mistakes in my paper and my adviser left a comment, then I knew what
he meant.” Several students said they felt less inhibited asking their adviser for advice or clarifi-
cation through IWiLL than during face-to-face meetings. Adviser’s comments also seemed to
increase motivation and a yearning to improve. Another student responded, “When I started
seeing my adviser’s comments I thought he worked harder at grading than I did at doing my
homework. I knew my adviser was reading every word I wrote. Before when I gave him my
paper[s] . . . , he [would] mark . . . [very] little. Before I never knew he read [my writing] so hard.”

Discussion and conclusion

Most Taiwanese enter academia without much need for English until they start graduate school.
Here, they are expected to read and understand scholarly articles from their future areas of
expertise while also adding to this community of research by writing academic journal articles
regardless of how ill-prepared most of them are. Professors are expected to not only guide advisees
in the beginnings of their academic research careers but also provide them with advice on
improving their English academic writing. Like Deegan (1995) discovered with law professors
teaching native speakers of English, Taiwanese professors often assume that their advisees
require no formal training in the structure or the reading of scholarly writing from their respec-
tive research fields. The results of this pilot showed that Taiwanese junior researchers benefited
from narrow reading of scholarly articles with a focus on text structure. Combined with the
affordances provided by IWiLL 2.0, a similar method adopted by future Taiwanese academic
advisers may assist these future advisers not only in providing English academic writing feedback
but also aid advisees in receiving and internalizing this feedback.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank the logistical assistance of Chiung-Chun Chen and the Graduate
Institute of Industrial Management at National Central University. The author would also like to
thank Professor David Wible for his comments and suggestions during the early stage of this
research project.

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© 2013 The Author. British Journal of Educational Technology © 2013 BERA.

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