Interactional practices for online collaborative writing

Abstract

This study aims to identify interactional practices to manage online collaborative writing. Conversation analysis techniques, which avoid researcher-driven theorisation and conceptualisation for collaborative processes but try to understand the meaning of actions in interaction from participants’ viewpoints, were used. This study examined one focal student’s changing interactional practices for paragraphing during computer-mediated writing tasks. Specifically, the changes occurred during negotiations over an essay’s introductory paragraph when a group of eight to nine students jointly wrote an essay across three tasks. The analysis shows that changes in online interactional practices rely on a learner’s ability to manage the asynchronous temporality of online talk as well as the timing of joining the task-based interaction; similarly, learners must manage linguistic and semiotic repertoires to design socially appropriate actions by exploiting the resources and constraints of text-based computer-mediated communication. The findings discursively support the argument that online collaborative writing provides students the opportunities to orient to other learners’ displayed understanding of organisational aspects of writing, as well as to acquire complex and multimodal interactional skills to manage computer-mediated second language writing.