Good or bad collaborative wiki writing: Exploring links between group interactions and writing products

Abstract

The wiki has empowered collaborative writing in L2 classes during this decade. Previous studies investigated wiki writing processes, including students’ contribution to wiki texts and patterns of interaction, but scarce is the research on the quality of wiki writing products in relation to peer interaction during writing processes. This article reports a case study that examined collaborative wiki writing texts, and explored the links between wiki-mediated interactions and wiki products when four small groups of ESL students performed a research proposal writing task in an English for Academic Purposes course. We examined the qualities of wiki group writing products by analyzing features of rhetorical structure, coherence, and accuracy, supplemented with the scores given by two raters. Based on previously reported results on group interactions (Li, 2014; Li & Kim, 2016), we also explored the connections between writing products and patterns of interaction in the wiki writing task environment. Results revealed that Group 1, which demonstrated a collective pattern, produced the research proposal of the highest writing quality, particularly in the areas of rhetorical structure and coherence, followed by Group 2 that exemplified an expert/novice pattern. Group 3 and Group 4 that exhibited a dominant/defensive pattern and a cooperating-in-parallel pattern respectively produced research proposals of relatively low quality. We explained the links between wiki interactions and products by drawing on scaffolding and co-ownership.