Exploring collaborative writing in wikis: a genre-based approach

While CALL research into collaborative writing in the L2 using wikis has mainly focused on the texts written by learners in terms of their grammatical accuracy (e.g. Mak & Coniam, 2008; Lee, 2010), the purpose of the present study is to draw attention to these texts as instances of a given genre. It reports on a small-scale experiment investigating a collaborative writing assignment using wikis focusing on the narrative genre. Specifically, it explores the extent to which first-year students in the Degree Course in Linguistic and Cultural Mediation at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (Italy) used wikis to include hypermedia objects such as audios, videos, images and hyperlinks when engaging with this genre online. The study draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) theory and its extensive research into genre analysis, in particular Hasan’s (1984) Generic Structure Potential (henceforth, GSP) and its application to nursery tales.