Educating L2 learners about collaborative writing: exploring the relationship between knowledge of collaborative writing and writing products

Abstract

Although research about the effectiveness of second or foreign language collaborative writing for jointly written products has proliferated in the last few decades, there has been less examination of whether and how pre-task preparation could maximize the language learning opportunities that collaborative writing can afford learners. Informed by metacognition theory, this study used a mixed-methods approach to investigate the impacts of one technique for preparing students, namely educating them about collaborative writing knowledge. This study compared collaborative writing products from two parallel classes (one with exposure to explicit collaborative writing knowledge and one without) to investigate whether and how knowledge about collaborative writing affected the complexity, fluency, accuracy, and quality of collaboratively drafted essays. The findings indicated that students who were exposed to collaborative writing knowledge outperformed those who were not in terms of the accuracy, fluency, and quality (content, organization, grammar, and vocabulary) of their collaboratively drafted essays. The findings also revealed that knowledge of collaborative writing affects the quality of collaboratively drafted essays from the perspective of metacognitive strategies, namely planning, monitoring, and evaluating one’s own writing process.

Keywords:

• Collaborative writing
• quality of the written product
• knowledge
• complexity
• accuracy
• fluency
• L2 writing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was sponsored by the research grant from the National Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Sciences, P. R. China (20210020041).

Notes on contributors

Wenting Chen

Wenting Chen is Associate Professor in Applied Linguistics at College English Department, Capital Normal University, China. Her research interests include second language writing, multicultural education, and second language teacher education. Her publications have appeared in international journals such as TESOL Quarterly, Language Teaching Research, System, Language Awareness, Educational Psychology, and The Asia-Pacific-Education Researcher.

Wei Ren

Wei Ren is Professor of Applied Linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages, Beihang University, China. His research interests include Pragmatics and second language acquisition. His recent publications include articles in Applied Linguistics, Assessing Writing, Discourse Context & Media, ELT Journal, Intercultural Pragmatics, International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, Journal of Pragmatics, Language Teaching, Lingua, Pragmatics, and System.