Impact of Online Collaborative Academic Writing on PhD TEFL Candidates’ Writing Engagement and Motivation: A Self-Determination Theory Perspective

While a multitude of studies suggest that collaborative writing strongly affects affective and non-cognitive factors, there is insufficient insight into how online collaborative educational interventions can enhance writing engagement and motivation in the realm of writing research article abstracts. Guided by self-determination theory (SDT), which posits that fulfilling learners’ needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness fosters intrinsic motivation and engagement, this study aimed to address this issue. A 10-session online program called the online collaborative academic writing course for research article abstracts was implemented for 40 PhD candidates of teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) using Adobe Connect and Google Docs. Two separate Likert-scale questionnaires measuring writing engagement and motivation were administered before and after the course. The results of descriptive and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) analyses demonstrated that, although both experimental and conventional groups benefited from improvements in their levels of writing engagement and motivation post-study, this improvement was much more significant for the experimental group. These findings suggest that technology-mediated collaborative writing environments can enhance motivation and engagement of PhD candidates of TEFL by addressing their basic psychological needs, ultimately leading to improved academic outcomes in graduate writing courses.