The Value, Logic and Path of Digital Education Enabling the Development of Academic Cognition in English Writing

It is widely acknowledged that Chinese EFL learners’ academic cognition in English writing is difficult to develop efficiently in traditional classroom teaching. To solve this problem, this research explores a digital teaching path of English academic writing based on the Bb-JiTT Model as a fusion innovation of just-in-time teaching on the digital teaching platform Blackboard. It aims to answer two questions about whether the model-based teaching could develop the learners’ academic cognition in English writing, and to what extent it can improve their academic writing abilities. A teaching experiment in English writing was conducted for one semester, in which a questionnaire and writing tests were designed to examine two questions, respectively. The research results show a statistically significant difference in the average scores of the questionnaire survey and writing tests from the experimental class before and after the Bb-JiTT model-based teaching of English writing, whereas there is no such difference from the controlled class. It indicates that a digital teaching approach is of high pedagogical value in enabling the development of EFL learners’ academic cognition in English writing.