Exploring Academic Writing: The Case for Arcs Theory

The online platform has accelerated the need to add variety to the teaching of academic writing. During face-to-face teaching, writing teachers depended on one-to-one conferencing with writers / groups of writers to check the completion of different stages of the writing tasks; however, online classes are not making the teaching of writing easier than before. This study explores yet another method of teaching writing online using the ARCS theory. This model includes a synthesis of motivational concepts and theories that are clustered into four categories: attention (A), relevance (R), confidence (C), and satisfaction (S). There is a correlation between confidence level and success expectation. That is why providing estimation of probability of the success to learners is important. The last component is (d) satisfaction. There is direct relation between motivation and satisfaction. Learners should be satisfied of what they achieved during the learning process. This study explores one approach to the teaching of writing via online. The writing-related activity is designed to motivate learners to enjoy learning academic writing online. Participants attended a semester of academic writing class via online. At the end of the semester, they responded to the survey to reveal their perception of the online writing course. 62 participants responded to the survey. The survey has 5 sections; section A is the demographic profile, section B is on attention, section C is on relevance, section D is on confidence and section E is on satisfaction. Findings showed that learners were positive about the online writing course due to several reasons. The writing activities helped them focus their (a) attention on graphic organisers and colours. The activities helped them see the (b) relevance of the graphic organisers to help them with the task. Group online activities gave the learners (c) confidence as well as (d) satisfaction towards the completion of the writing task. The findings of this study bear interesting implications towards the teaching of writing online.