Collaborative writing among young EFL learners in a school context: product and process

ABSTRACT

The recent surge in studies on collaborative writing (CW) has provided valuable insights into the product and process of writing. When writing together, adults tend to produce better texts and generate and resolve a large number of language-related episodes (LREs). Also, analyses of the dialogues of collaborative writers show that learners are able to co-construct knowledge and mainly focus their attention on the generation of ideas. As for young learners (YLs), the very few studies comparing jointly and individually written texts have not identified any advantages in the use of collaboratively written drafts.Furthermore, while YLs also produce and resolve LREs in CW tasks, no study to date has provided a thorough analysis of their dialogues. To address these gaps, this study compares the products of primary school learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) aged 11–12 writing in pairs (n = 20) and individually (n = 19) and provides a thorough analysis of pair talk (process). Results suggest that collaborative writers produced more accurate texts and focused most of their efforts on the generation of ideas and on the discussion and successful resolution of LREs. In light of these results the implementation of CW with YLs is encouraged.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative writing
• young learners
• CAF
• writing-to-learn
• language-related episodes

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, National Research Agency and European Regional Development Fund- AEI/FEDER/EU [FFI2016-74950-P]. We would also like to thank the schools, the teachers and children for their willingness and generosity to participate in this project.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness: [Grant Number FFI2016-74950-P]; the Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea: [Grant Number Doctores recientes 2018-1].