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The United States remains the worlds most popular international student destination country over the past decade. In 2019 alone, it hosted more than one million international students, the majority of whom speak English as an additional language ("Number of International Students")- With the internationalization of American higher education, university campuses have evolved into "fundamentallymultilingual spaces in which students and faculty bring to the acts of writing and communication a rich array of linguistic and cultural resources" ("CCCC Statement on Second Language Writing and Multilingual Writers"; Poe and Zhang-Wu). In response to the linguistically superdiverse reality, many colleges provide college composition courses specifically targeting multilingual international students. These writing classes play an important role in facilitating learners' English language and academic writing development.
While college composition courses have traditionally been delivered in a face-to-face manner, due to the COVID-19 outbreak, online education has become a promising opportunity for English writing instruction. Yet college composition classes, which are highly interactive in nature, face substantial pedagogical challenges when transitioning into a fully online format. In particular, when international students are joining remote classes from all over the world from various time zones with different accessibility challenges, it is extremely difficult to create a meaningful teaching and learning community among multilingual international students within college composition classes (Zhang-Wu, "Keeping"; Zhang-Wu, "Teaching"). For instance, according to data from this present study approved by my institutional review board (IRB #: 20-08-07), one of my previous international students wrote in their end-of-semester reflection that even though they have learned lots of valuable writing techniques in my asynchronous online first-year composition class, they "constantly felt lonely" because they were unable to "engage with [their] peers in a class community." Echoing such frustration of being unable to learn writing in an engaging online community, another student wrote: "I did learn to write better, but all on my own. I wanted to make friends with my classmates and chat with them about my writing ideas to grow together. But with time differences, I hardly knew anyone."
Previous research has consistently found that establishing an engaging learning community during teaching is beneficial for students' academic and psychological well-being (Swan). With the rampant spread of the global pandemic, students face substantial challenges mentally, physically, and academically. Among...