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In the following section various details of the research setting are presented to give the readers an overview o f the actual pedagogic and assessment practices along with the role of both teachers and students as the participants o f this study.

3.2.1 The course

The English 217 (Writing IV) is a three credit-hour (class tim e per week) academic course that is compulsory for all students o f the English Department, King Khalid University (KKU). It is designed to prepare students for academic writing skills. The requirement to enrol in the course is that the students must have passed the English 213 (Writing III) course. The following list o f course objectives and skills that students are expected to acquire is provided by the department.

Course objectives:

a. To enable students to achieve mastery o f writing skills in English through an awareness o f different types of essays (analytical, expository, informative, persuasive etc)

b. To provide students with an introduction to writing research papers/essays for academic purpose.

c. To train learners to acquire an error free writing style and equip them with an advanced knowledge o f parallel structure, repetition, wordiness, paragraph unity and cohesion, run-ons, coma splices etc.

According to the course materials, by the end o f the semester the student should be able to:

1. W rite a detailed essay on any given topic. 56

2. Show command o f complex grammatical structures.

3. Use writing ability to achieve the academic goals required o f a university graduate.

3.2.2 The instructional tasks and the role of the teacher

The W riting IV course described above was a blended course. Blended courses in my university are o f three types, ranging from 30%, 50%, and 75% online portions o f course classroom time. For example a three credit hour course (the one that I was studying) which was 30% blended was required to be taught for tw o hours in face-to-face classes every week. For the remaining one hour, the teachers were required to decide the online contents. They had a certain amount of freedom in terms of the type o f activities to engage learners in but they had to use activities that encouraged three types of interaction: content-learner, learner-learner, and instructor-learner. Content-learner interaction in the classes I investigated was carried out through students' reading from the online-resource site PufdtreorHine-whielr is af»-online-repository o f resources-on academic writing. The students were required to read certain topics related to form, content, layout, genre conventions, structure, language issues from the resource, in addition to the course book reading and then post their responses in the W riting Mechanics forum, usually by answering questions set on the topic for readings, posting queries if they were not clear about a certain issue they found difficult to comprehend and/or posting an answer to another student's queries. Learner-learner interaction was promoted through tw o other forums, the brainstorming forum and peer-feedback forum. All these forums were provided through the Blackboard® LMS Discussion Board tool. In the brainstorming forum, students were required to choose from a given list o f essay topics and then post an outline of their initial ideas about the essay contents after

brainstorming. The teachers also urged them to post suggestions and/or advice to other students. In the Peer feedback forum students were required to post the first draft of their essays for peer-review, provide feedback to peers on their first draft, revise the first draft and post the final draft after reviewing it in the light o f the feedback provided by the peers. Teacher-learner interaction took place in all the forums as the teacher was the designer, activity initiator and mediator o f all the forums. The 6 Elluminate Live Sessions (synchronous) conducted through BB were used by the teacher to present some issue already lectured about in the class and to post questions for discussing them live in these sessions. These synchronous discussions were recorded and later analysed to trace various discourse functions.

The teachers provided scaffolding for all these pedagogic activities. They delivered lectures in the face-to-face classroom and asked the students to do further reading on the topic from the online resource. The students were then required to post their responses to the discussion questions posted by the teachers in online W riting Mechanics Forum. In addition if the students found any differences or new ideas on the Perdueonline resource (https//ow l.english.purdue.edu/), they could bring it to the notice o f the others. Usually the tim e fo r submission o f an assignment was one week after the discussion was posted by the teacher. In the following week the teacher provided essay topics for brainstorming and the students posted an outline o f their initial ideas. In the third week the students were required to write and post the first drafts of their essays and provide feedback to their peers. On the last day of the week they were required to submit the revised drafts of their essays after making revisions in the light o f the peer feedback.

The instructors provided instructions in the face-to-face classes on how and when to participate in these forums. Net-etiquettes for online participation were also discussed

and negotiated. CMC via Blackboard® LMS was part of the course but not all the students' online participation was assessed for course evaluation. The assignments posted on the Blackboard® LMS were assessed and marked and they constituted 30% o f the total term work assessment. The participation in both synchronous and asynchronous online forums was not part of the term work assessment, although participation in synchronous sessions was mandatory as it counted towards the attendance requirements to be fulfilled by every student. So the use o f CMC was not always consistent by all the students. I chose the tw o most frequented asynchronous forums to discern language functions when students were engaged in the academic literacy activities through CMC. They were the forum for brainstorming and generating ideas for essay topics and the forum fo r peer feedback provided on the first drafts o f students' essays. In addition, postings in the synchronous chat data from 6 one-hour sessions was also searched fo r discourse functions.

3.2.3 Assessment practices

The course assessment was done using the following division of 100% total marks.

1. 1st mid-term exam = 15% 2. 2nd mid-term exam = 15% 3. Quizzes = 5%

4. Final Examination = 35%

5. Blackboard® LMS activities = 30% (This constituted four w ritten assignments (essays) per student)

Seventy percent of the course work was assessed through paper based w ritten exams. The remaining 30% were assigned to Blackboard® LMS activities.

3.2.3 Participants

The participants in this study were second-year students of the English Department, College o f Languages and Translation, King Khalid University (KKU) in Abha and their instructors. All the participants were male, since coeducation does not exist in Saudi Arabia for religious reasons. The students were enrolled in two English 217 (Writing IV) classes (N=26 and 21) in the First Semester 2011 (August 2011- January 2012). Since it was difficult to code and analyse all the 47 students' online data and w ritten assignments and also conduct interviews with them later, 10 participants were chosen from across the tw o classes along with their teachers to be the participants of this case study. The selection o f these 10 participants was carried out on the basis o f initial data analysis of the first part of the questionnaire (see Appendix A) that was distributed to all the students o f the tw o sections during the first week o f their academic term. Care was taken to include participants representing different educational backgrounds, and academic competence in order to make the group of ten participants as much representational as possible o f the total 47 students.

As shown by the questionnaire (Appendix A) results, all the 10 participants had similar demographic and cultural backgrounds and were almost equally computer- literate, but had varied experience o f EFL. They had all passed their higher secondary school exams and were in the 2nd year o f undergraduate studies. However, 7 o f them had about 8 years' experience o f studying English—one year at the primary school, 6 years in the middle and secondary schools and over one year in the university, while three of them had all their schooling in local private English medium schools. Therefore these 3 students had over 13 years o f exposure to English as a foreign language. The participants

were beginners in the field o f academic writing and had limited understanding and experience o f the writing requirements and conventions. But they seemed to be aware o f the importance of reading literature and participation in different types o f academic writing in order to succeed in the discipline. Computer competence o f participants was almost the same. All the participants were adept in using the computer and Blackboard® LMS as they had been using this Learning Management System (LMS) fo r over a year now during their stay in the college undertaking various blended courses. The e-learning deanship provided training sessions to all university students.

One o f the instructors (an Arab) who consented to participate in the study is well experienced (10 years teaching) and has a doctorate in Applied Linguistics. He had used the Blackboard® LMS for more than a year, that is, since its availability in the university. The second instructor (an Indian) is also well versed with the Blackboard® LMS. He is relatively younger and has a Master's in Applied Linguistics, with three years o f teaching experience. Aware o f my research work for the EdD, he actually volunteered to participate in this study in order to gain insights about the experience o f CMC and its pedagogical influence.