No abstract

This paper reports on an empirical study that examined changes in L2 writers’ perceived use of metacognitive strategies after receiving a process-genre writing instruction. Following a mixed-methods approach, this study was conducted in two intact College English classes at a university in China. Participants were 72 first-year undergraduates, with an experimental group (n = 40) taught by the process-genre writing approach and a comparison group (n = 32) receiving conventional writing instruction. A Likert-scale questionnaire was used to examine students’ changes in their conceptualized metacognitive strategies. Think-aloud protocols were conducted to gain an in-depth understanding of students’ application of metacognitive strategies and genre knowledge in performing writing tasks. Findings revealed that the process-genre instruction had a significantly positive impact on the “considering the audience” factor, and students’ conception of the audience was clearer and more diversified. An in-depth analysis of the think-aloud protocols showed that the participants incorporated the acquired metacognitive strategies and genre knowledge in completing writing tasks, with more pre-task planning time focused on both global and local aspects. Students’ metacognitive monitoring also shifted from surface-level lexical and grammar regulation to discourse-level text control.

This article introduces the use of Internet-mediated joint construction (JC) to engage second language (L2) writers to participate in virtual classroom activities in an online teaching environment. Affected by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, schools and universities in the People’s Republic of China were required to rapidly transit to remote teaching. The switch from the traditional classroom-based scenarios to the online environment was challenging for teachers. One of the extreme difficulties is to engage students in virtual-class activities. To address this issue, the authors designed an Internet-mediated JC teaching practice and implemented it on ClassIn, an online teaching platform for one semester. Analysis of students’ after-class online surveys and interviews suggested that the Internet-mediated JC practice helped students to build a connected network and thus engaged them in actively interacting with both the teacher and peers in the online environment. Pedagogical implications are discussed to contribute to the teaching practice of L2 online writing instruction.

To solve the problems encountered in the process of the college teachers teaching evaluation, Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) and Dynamic Fuzzy Sets (DFS) are introduced. AHP is used to reduce subjective interference in the teacher evaluation when the weights are determined, and DFS to obtain dynamic comprehensive evaluation results. The experimental results reveal not only the level of teachers teaching but the trend of every index and comprehensive levels of teachers.

No abstract