Saturday, December 10, 2016

WeCWI: The Fifth Keynote


Dr Mah Boon Yih has delivered his fifth keynote address entitled WeCWI: Integrating Language Acquisition and Composition Studies towards Literacy Development in the 6th International Conference on Language, Literature, Culture & Education (ICLLCE) on 10-11 December 2016 at Liberty Central Saigon Citypoint Hotel, 59-61 Pasteur Street, District 1, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

The abstract of the keynote is shown as follows:

WeCWI is an e-framework grounded on the theoretical-and-pedagogical principles of language acquisition, composition studies, cognitive theories, and e-learning to promote literacy, language, cognitive, and psychological developments. This study aimed to tackle the writing complexity and deficiency of literacy skills among the second language (L2) learners by reviewing the literature on the integration of language acquisition and composition studies to become a hybrid framework. Three fundamental language acquisition theories such as acquisition-learning hypothesis, input hypothesis, and reading hypothesis were adopted in WeCWI. To develop a tool of web-based instruction (WBI) using WeCWI, instructors are encouraged to publish greater functions and more up-to-date reading materials by utilising the web widgets and hypertext, which offer the direct access to specific online reading materials to the learners. This will also promote reading on voluntary basis in informal setting or free reading, which is the major source of literacy competence in various aspects including vocabulary, spelling, grammar, and writing (Krashen, 1992). Besides, formal reading can also be made available on WBI through posting the targeted reading materials related to the course’s learning outcomes. Furthermore, WeCWI adopted Yan (2005)’s six typical writing steps based on Badger and White (2000)’s process genre approach. This approach helps instructors to create the writing tasks driven by specific purposes and forms that enable the learners to be engaged in the recursive writing process through six writing steps: preparation, modelling and reinforcing, planning, joint constructing, independent constructing, and revising. Since guided writing is the most imperative factor on how to develop and formulate abstract ideas (Lan, Hung, & Hsu, 2011), interactive media in the form of web widget or hypertext can be embedded to assist these writing steps. In conclusion, the integration of language acquisition theories and process genre approach into WeCWI empowers WBI towards literacy development.

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