Teaching Writing in Asynchronous Environment

In chapter three of the book Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes, the writers take five pedagogical principles: investigation, immersion, individualization, association, and reflection, defined in chapter one, and apply them to teaching in the asynchronous environment. This chapter is intended to provide trainees - the main audience - and other educators with an orientation, employing the one-to-one asynchronous writing conference as the primary point of reference. It is also designed to provide educators with tools to create a program.

The chapter achieves this by defining the online writing lab (OWL) and asserts that asynchronous instruction has the ability to "represent a dialogue interaction as reflective of the social-constructivist and the related computer-mediated communication (CMC) paradigms" (70). The chapter also provides principles of asynchronous OWL. "These principles, tested both in the face-to-face and asynchronous online teaching modalities, are built on widely accepted beliefs about the writing process and serve to ground trainees within a common sphere of instruction" (72). The writers advocate a problem-based approach and address writing from the following principles: fluency, form, and correctness; they draw from audience, purpose, and occasion to manage the revising phase of the writing process.

Next, the writers apply the principles, offering five steps to help the instructor manage the time spent reading and responding to student writing, a concern expressed in our class discussions. Two of the steps stand out in my mind. Step 2 suggests that instructors have access to archives of previous writing submissions, while step 4 asks instructors to consider a student's requests for additional help and offers a few response suggestions. In addition, the writers offer asynchronous questions, summarize teaching techniques, and evaluate the online writing program that uses the asynchronous OWL.

As an instructor who has employed very few asynchronous instructional tools, I found that the chapter provides a comprehensive framework for this type of instruction from principles to evaluation techniques. Though more experienced instructors might find some of the information a bit basic, the chapter outlines online writing instruction in such a way that the beginner is given a road map with which to navigate program creation and execution, complete with an "advice for trainee" paragraph at the beginning of each section. It does this without dumbing down the language, providing pedagogical rational throughout the chapter. The authors also make a point of embracing long held practices by adapting them to the online environment. While the writers' intended audience in this chapter is the asynchronous instructor, I find that many of the things outlined could easily be applied in F2F and synchronous classrooms.


Hewett, Beth L., Christa Ehmann. Preparing Educators for Online Writing Instruction: Principles and Processes. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 2004.