A Wikipedia Project to Improve Academic Writing: An Academic Summary of Tardy’s (2010) Article

The issue that many undergraduate-level second language (L2) students do not posses good academic literacy skills is presented in “Writing for the World: Wikipedia as an Introduction to Academic Writing” (Tardy, 2010). Tardy (2010) states that a good way to help students acquire these skills is by introducing them in writing an article for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia (p.13).

According to Tardy (2010), for students to write academically, they should “adopt the styles and genres of academic discourse” (p. 12). A useful way to teach academic skills is through a genre-based approach (Hyland, 2007; cited in Tardy, 2010, p. 17) in which students are offered the possibility to analyze the characteristics of Wikipedia articles; such as their purpose, language and content.

By proposing students to write an article for Wikipedia and by guiding them through the process, they will acquire not only academic researching skills, appropriate forms of citation, paraphrasing and summarizing skills, technical terminology, grammatical patterns but also the style and genre of the field.

Tardy (2010) says that “in producing a text for Wikipedia, students gain a real sense of audience” (p. 18). Thus, they may be eager to publish their writings in a global site.  Besides, as anyone can edit papers online, peer feedback can be profitable to improve writing.  

To sum up, “Students can begin to develop academic literacy skills through small-scale research projects” (Tardy, 2010, p.18). The Wikipedia-writing project offers students the possibility to publish for a real and global audience; they move from within the classroom towards the outside world with plenty of tools to fit in the academic field.

References

Hyland, K. 2007. Genre pedagogy: Language, literacy and L2 writing instruction.

Journal of Second Language Writing 16 (3): 148-64. as cited in Tardy, C. M.

(2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to academic

writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27.

Tardy, C. M. (2010). Writing for the world: Wikipedia as an introduction to academic                       writing. English Teaching Forum, 1, pp. 12-19, 27.