Collaborative character searches in L2 Chinese peer writing: sequential design and object affordances

ABSTRACT

In light of the growing field of research on writing-in-interaction within an ethnomethodological (EM) and conversation analytic (CA) perspective, which peer writing as a situated activity unfolded by participants, this study investigates how L2 Chinese learners accomplish collaborative character searches during a peer writing task. The analysis shows that learners’ collaborative character search follows a three-phase sequential design: problem-displaying, attention-drawing, and problem-resolving phases, during which they employ various multimodal resources to achieve interactional goals. By using different objects, participants demonstrate their agency in coordinating resources while collaboratively searching for the correct character(s). Furthermore, participants’ interactions with objects provide affordances for a particular point for noticing, transferring the writership, displaying epistemic stance, re-directing attention, and exploring the emergent learnable. This study unveils how L2 Chinese learners do collaborative character searches during peer writing and extends our understanding of the intricate coordination of multimodal resources in collaborative character search work. It contributes to ongoing discussions on (hand)writing-in-interaction within the EM/CA field by illustrating how participants navigate the intricacies of logographic writing while doing writing.

KEYWORDS:

• Collaborative search
• writing-in-interaction
• peer writing
• objects in interaction
• Chinese as a second language

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. To the best of the author’s knowledge, there is limited EM/CA research dedicated to logographic writings (such as Chinese or Japanese characters). Specifically, this line of research mainly focused on calligraphy instructions (e.g. Arano 2020, 2023; Nishizaka 2020) or explored how participants characters to address interactional problems and navigate learning moments in ordinary conversations (e.g. Hwang 2009; Kasper and Burch 2016).

2. The Chinese ba construction is referred to as the ‘disposal, executive, pre-transitive, or causative construction’ (Li 2017, 1). To construct a sentence like ‘He put food in the bowl’ in Chinese, which describes how something was handled by a person, the ba construction (i.e. subject + ba + object + verb + prepositional phrase) is an appropriate construction to use.

3. No case in my dataset shows that the work of recruiting is accomplished solely by lifting the pen or gaze. However, Mlynář (2023) also mentioned that the instances in which the work of recruiting is achieved solely by lifting the gaze or pen are very rare, as inscribers routinely combine it with talk.

4. In my data, I did not observe any instances where participants initiated a character search after an initial writing attempt (i.e. a repair sequence). Participants tended to overlook erroneous characters, which might be attributed to their limited orthographic knowledge.

5. In my dataset of 36 cases of collaborative character searches, 86% of them were resolved correctly through the collaboration of dyads, which is considered a quite high success rate. However, it is beyond the scope of this study to suggest peer writing is more accurate when using characters than solitary writing. Thus, this finding should be interpreted cautiously.