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In this section, I turn to review some studies that explore the role o f CMC tools in developing academic literacies in various disciplinary writing courses fo r academic purposes. This section is useful in highlighting how an academic w riting community is actually divided into different disciplines. A review o f research on disciplinary w riting (here referring to writing in other disciplines like history, law etc) may provide further

insights into the effectiveness o f CMC in promoting academic literacy and collaboration in such advanced and formal writing contexts.

The section starts with a study by Warschauer (1999) as evidence to show that there is research to suggest the social benefits o f CMC. Warschauer reported 15 cases of graduate students from various countries enrolled in the Writing for Foreign Graduate Students course for the purpose o f being integrated into their academic life in their disciplines while studying in USA. Students were engaged through various forms o f CMC like email, synchronous chat, discussion board, Listserv and home page and were required to write academic papers in their own disciplines. Warschauer reported that the use of the computer as a medium matches up with a tutor-tutee model o f apprenticeship, a collaborative model o f apprenticeship learning between students, and a peripheral participation model of apprenticeship as propounded by Lave & Wenger (1991). Warschauer presents cases o f Miyako and Zhong as examples of tutor-tutee model. Miyako, a first year M.A. student, for the most part learnt the academic w riting process in the United States. She regularly communicated through sending emails to the instructor and peers raising her questions, doubts and concerns about academic life in the US. For students like Miyako, inclusion o f CMC tools helped them to actively engage with their teachers and peers, that is their disciplinary discourse community. A differing case from that o f Miyako, using CMC tools benefited Zhong, an established w riter in his discipline, through his individualized contact with the teacher via electronic communication. Bearing his real world questions in mind, he protected his own academic rights, and at the same time, kept a positive relationship with his remote peers. Warschauer shows that not only did CMC tools provide more opportunities for teacher-student interaction but they also enhanced collaborative learning among students. A comparison o f samples o f face-to- face discussion and online synchronous discussion indicate that the teacher's role in

online discussion is decentralized. Instead, student-centred discussion becomes the norm. Students' entries into their discourse communities were facilitated through various activities o f peripheral participation—participating in simple and low-risk tasks that are helpful and indispensable and further the goals of the community—such as talking to the professor and fellow graduate students and reading journal articles as well. So Warschauer concludes that CMC could serve as a productive medium fo r peripheral participation.

The role o f computer conferencing in the development o f students' disciplinary knowledge was reported in another study by Lea (2001). Exploiting an ethnographic approach, Lea's data consisted o f online discussion entries, copies o f marked assignments with tu to r comments and feedback, email responses to tutor's semi-structured questions from seven participants and telephone interviews with all participants located in different countries. The focus o f her analysis was intertextuality in order to see whether the texts o f the computer conferences were reflected in the texts of students' w ritten assignments. The results showed that asynchronous computer conferencing provided extended chances o f collaborative learning among students along with opportunities fo r learners to reflect on their own and peers' academic arguments. Students also drew upon their peers' writing in the construction o f their own disciplinary knowledge in which texts from computer conferencing were reflected in the students' writing assignments. Lea (2001) also pointed out the efficacy o f CMC tools in changing peers' role from being passive to assuming authoritative status in the class. So this study implicitly endorses the social benefits o f CMC.

Lindblom-Ylanne & Pihlajamaki (2003) examine whether a CMC environment enhances essay writing o f law students by providing an opportunity to share drafts with

fellow students and receive feedback from a draft version. Twenty-five law students participated in this qualitative study. Data for this study were collected from interviews with both students and teachers. The results showed that the students deepened their understanding, elaborated their own ideas, improved critical and independent skills, and developed self-regulative skills. Additionally, the active use of a CMC environment was related to good essay grades.

The three studies described above show that CMC tools facilitated the process of students' disciplinary knowledge development in discipline specific w riting contexts through promoting either student-teacher or student-student collaboration. There were social benefits in terms o f increased participation and sharing which led to improved critical and independent skills in using the CMC tools.

The final study included in this section was conducted by Cheng (2007) tapping into the role o f CMC tools in non-native speakers' acquisition o f academic literacy. The researcher examined how a group o f ESL students studying Applied Linguistics attempted the acquisition o f academic literacy in this course by completing a series o f assignments they were required to complete as teacher trainees. This study applied a case study methodology, with the purpose o f understanding the complex phenomenon o f academic writing activities as experienced by NNS participants enrolled in a course in the field of applied linguistics. The researcher gleaned his data from eight sources: observations, questionnaires, online discussion entries, online peer feedback, students' major assignments, source materials, interviews and discourse-based interviews, all o f which were analysed qualitatively and quantitatively, utilising a variety o f methods and statistical schemes. Findings indicated that the participants in the study used various language functions (such as questioning, explaining, advising, supporting and confirming

etc and quite similar to my discourse functions) in their negotiation o f academic literacy with their peers in the online discussion. They also manipulated multiple intertextual techniques (like revising, rewriting and editing as suggested by peers) in the online discussion, whereas only a few such techniques were used in face-to-face class discussions. Finally, the study indicated that computer-mediated communication facilitated students' understanding o f tasks, performance of writing activities and the correct application o f citation conventions. The study bore reliable testimony in favour of CMC in fostering and facilitating the acquisition o f academic literacies. Cheng did not consider whether collaboration and sharing was important in achieving these results with students, but her study informed my research as to the design, analysis methods and implications of the favourable findings o f CMC and its affordances in improving and promoting academic literacy skills in disciplinary courses. In addition to what Cheng did, I will be looking at the collaborative and interactional benefits (feeling o f improvement and fulfilm ent for task completion, decreased anxiety, and possibility o f enhanced -part-icipation-in-a setting lessHntimidating-than face-to-face due to the aoonymity-of+he—

medium, fewer chances of code switching and increased collaboration) o f CMC and the students' perceptions and attitudes towards its use in addition to or in support o f classroom instruction.