WeCWI: The Third Keynote

The 6th ICLEI organising committee invited Dr Mah Boon Yih to participate as a keynote speaker at the 6th International Conference on Language, Education and Innovation (ICLEI) held at Royal Plaza on Scotts Hotel, 25 Scotts Road, Singapore 228220 on 29-30 October 2016. This is the third time Dr Mah being invited to deliver his keynote address in the international conference entitled From SIL to WeCWI: Overcoming L2 Learners’ Barriers to Writing through Web-Based Instruction. The abstract of the keynote is shown as follows:

Rooted from the performance analysis based on the results of an English course offered by Universiti Teknologi MARA (UiTM) in two consecutive semesters, nine L2 writing challenges were identified. These barriers to L2 writing were further analysed and elucidated in a form of chain diagram namely “SIL”, which means system (S), instructor (I), and learner (L). SIL proposes a sequence of deductive remedial actions for writing predicaments. Its learner domain was further scrutinised to examine the writing difficulties faced by UiTM undergraduates as the L2 learners. Based on the qualitative systematic review of the past studies on UiTM students’ writing problems supported by the instructors and learners’ writing needs, seven perspectives of poor writing skills were determined: writing complexity, literacy, proficiency, critical thinking, information literacy, interlanguage, and writing anxiety. Owing to the global impact of the internet, the positive outcomes of web-based writing instructions, as well as the high demand for developing a supplementary web-based instructional tool, an e-framework namely WeCWI was formulated grounded on the theoretical-and-pedagogical principles, which comes with four significances that promote in literacy, language, cognitive, and psychological developments. WeCWI synthesises the selected principles of theories, approach, and models from language acquisition, composition studies, cognitive theories, and e-learning. The injection of web 2.0, blog, into the framework as the instructional platform to enhance the writing performance and critical thinking.