Building Students’ Reading-Into-Writing Skills in Webquest

Abstract

Background: Given the immediate access to multiple online resources and the necessity to utilize them in various professional fields has prompted the need in building ofreading-into-writing skills in English. These skills could be effectively shaped while computer assisted language learning such as WebQuest. Purpose: WebQuest, which has been used in various teaching/learning environments for over 20 years, appeared particularly relevant in teaching English for professional communication. Being based upon internet sources, WebQuest engages students in reading and processing texts offered in the Resources Section and further transforming them according to the Central Task of the WebQuest. This paper focuses on the skills the students need to develop in order to write two types of texts based on the reading online texts – writing brief notes for visual support (slides) and full text of their oral presentation. Discussion: Performing WebQuest in a foreign language suggests that the students have to activate their intellectual resources while doing the professional tasks and face certain linguistic barriers. Therefore, WebQuest Joining a Global Company designed for students of economics (www.zunal.com) provides a variety of scaffolds which were first offered by I. Perez Torrez. These include activation of background knowledge, language workshops (lexical and grammatical exercises), glossaries, etc. The activities that comprise the language workshop are aimed to build such reading-into-writing skills as understanding macrostructure and microstructure of the online texts and fixate the most important information in writing. Each group of activities envisages the development of relevant subskills. Given the computer-based processing of the online texts, attention is paid to the issues of eliminating plagiarism while considering such writing techniques as copying, patchwriting and summarizing information. Results: The role of the internet in obtaining information at today’s workplace is invaluable, however, prospective professionals should be taught skills and strategies of effective processing this information without plagiarizing the sources.