Learners’ Attitudes and Benefits towards a Languaging Course: Wikipedia as a Real-World Writing Task

As the recent trend of ELT studies has begun to realize how languaging, one area of English as a lingua franca (ELF), can play an important role to help learners learn English language effectively. However, written languaging is still an under-researched ELT area when compared to oral languaging. This study attempted to explore the effects of a written languaging course on 40 students who are architecture and design students studying in an international program at a Thai university. The course made use of writing Wikipedia articles as its real-world tasks. Students’ attitudes and benefits towards the course were identified through their reflective reports after finishing writing the articles. Although some challenging issues emerged while they were performing the tasks due to the restriction of Wikipedia rules, students mostly considered the course beneficial in terms of improving their English writing and research related skills.