Abstract
Despite the importance of writing skills to academic success, many undergraduates face a lot of challenges with writing in English. Studies have shown that engaging and supporting students in a writing process help to improve the students’ writing performance. Therefore, this study used a Problem-based learning approach (PBL) in order to give students opportunities to be engaged and support one another in a writing process through face-to-face interactions. The paper specifically reports what the students do to support their peer in the PBL writing process. An intact class of 18 second-year students in an English Composition course in Nigeria was selected to participate in the study. Data were obtained through audio- and video-recording of the students’ face-to-face interactions. The findings showed that the participants supported theirs peer through various ways in the PBL process such as modelling their facilitators, sharing tasks and responsibilities, clarifying instructions and unclear terms, using dictionary, suggesting other sources to get more information, checking for consensus, creating humour, encouraging others to participate and raise their voices while speaking, restating time given to a session and giving overview of a previous session. The support provided by the peers helped the students to improve their writing. The study has some implications for writing teachers.
Highlights
Group learning has been widely used in second language classrooms (Storch, 2005)
The goal of assisting learners is to enable them to get into a zone of proximal development for learning (ZPD) which is the range of tasks which are too difficult for a learner to master alone but that can be learned with guidance and assistance of a teacher or more able peer
It could be claimed that the Problem-based learning approach (PBL) approach allows for students’ actualization of ZPD which is the distance between the actual developmental levels independently achieved by a learner and the level of potential development achieved under the guidance of an adult or in collaboration with more capable peers
Summary
Group learning has been widely used in second language classrooms (Storch, 2005). There are two levels of learning; the actual development level which is already reached by a learner, and potential development (zone of proximal development) level is the one yet to be reached by a learner. At the level actual development level, a learner is capable of solving a problem independently; while at the potential development level a learner is capable of reaching with the help of a teacher or more able peer
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