The method of co-writing essays and their mutual evaluation in teaching writing and speaking skills
The article is devoted to development of foreign language writing skills at non-linguistic university. Wiki technology, as a tool of web 2.0, has a specific didactic potential that allows designing individual, pair or group learning. The application of the method of writing collaborative essays followed by reviewing the written pieces by other students on the basis of wiki technology contributes to achieving this goal in a short time. The authors have conducted verification of the method and due to the results of the first stage changes took place in the process of teaching the ability to write an essay. The algorithm of the work on collaborative wiki-essays followed by peer assessment for all participants of the educational process is given. The authors reveal the purposes of the collaborative writing stage and peer assessment stage as well as necessary writing microskills. The surveys of the students, who took the course in learning writing skills with the use of this method, show a positive attitude to learning on a wiki-site. Analysis of comparison of learning outcomes on the wiki in the experimental groups shows an increase in the number of the essays in comparison with the number of the essays written by control groups working individually on paper and assessed by the teacher only. The statistically processed results of the final examination have proved a high effectiveness of the method of collaborative essay writing followed by peer assessment.