TEACHING WRITING IN ONLINE VS. FACE-TO-FACE CLASSROOMS: PEDAGOGICAL CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Keywords:
Academic writing pedagogy, online learning, face-to-face instructionAbstract
The rapid migration of educational practice to virtual environments has compelled writing instructors to re-evaluate time-honoured classroom strategies. Although online platforms extend access and diversify modes of feedback, they also exacerbate issues of learner engagement, cognitive load, and assessment reliability. This empirical study compares the experiences of 86 pre-service English‐language teachers who completed parallel sixteen-week writing-methodology courses delivered either fully online or in traditional face-to-face formats. Mixed-methods data—including weekly reflective journals, rubric-based text assessments and semi-structured interviews—were analysed to identify instructional obstacles and corresponding solutions. Results show that while online cohorts benefited from multimodal resources and asynchronous revision cycles, they reported diminished collaborative fluency and higher rates of feedback misinterpretation. In-person participants demonstrated stronger peer-review dynamics but struggled with equitable participation and real-time anxiety. The findings underscore the necessity of explicit feedback training, scaffolded digital literacy, and balanced synchronous–asynchronous task design to cultivate advanced writing competencies across modalities. Recommendations include integrating annotated video feedback, rotating peer-feedback triads, and deploying learning-analytics dashboards to support self-regulation.
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