Abstract
One important strand of research in collaborative writing has been the learners’ attitudes and perceptions toward collaborative writing. This study sets out to compare three pairs of students’ perceptions and their actual collaborative writing practices. Multiple sources of data were collected. Students’ semi-interviews were audio recorded, transcribed and analyzed for their perceptions. Their collaborative writing tasks are also recorded and analyzed for quantity, type and resolution of language related episodes (LREs). The study further examined the collaborative texts using both quantitative and qualitative measures for students’ language improvement. Our finding suggest that most participants expressed positive attitudes towards collaborative writing but only half of them were aware of language improvement. An analysis of pairs’ discussion revealed that participants were overly concerned with vocabulary and all LREs were successfully resolved. The quantitative and qualitative analysis of collaborative texts demonstrated that two pairs received considerable language improvements in terms of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, fluency and text quality. These findings can be used to encourage students to reflect on their own perceptions and practices in collaborative writing tasks.
Highlights
Collaborative writing is typically defined as the joint production of a text or the coauthoring of a text by two or more writers (Storch, 2011)
Our finding suggest that most participants expressed positive attitudes towards collaborative writing but only half of them were aware of language improvement
The quantitative and qualitative analysis of collaborative texts demonstrated that two pairs received considerable language improvements in terms of lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, fluency and text quality
Summary
Collaborative writing is typically defined as the joint production of a text or the coauthoring of a text by two or more writers (Storch, 2011). Recent years have witnessed a significant growth of research on collaborative writing in L2 classroom (Li & Zhu, 2017; Mozaffari, 2017; Storch, 2013; Wu, 2015; Zhang, 2018). The use of collaborative writing tasks is supported by cognitive and sociocultural theories of L2 learning. From the cognitive perspective, Long’s (1996) interaction hypothesis suggests that negotiating for meaning and form increases the learning opportunities and facilitates L2 learning. The sociocultural perspective of learning, originally based on Vygotsky (1978), emphasized that language learning was inherently a socially mediated process. Learners construct knowledge in social interaction with experts or more capable peers
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