Fostering Chinese Learning through Collaborative Writing Activities

1. Fostering Chinese Learning through Collaborative Writing Activities Jun Tian University of Victoria, Canada CLEF, San Francisco October 19, 2013

2. Two Collaborative Writing Activities

3. Why Collaborative Writing? • Cognitive Writing Process Theory (Flower & Hayes, 1981; Flower, 1989) • Writing is process-oriented, not product-oriented. • Writing multiple drafts and receiving feedback from various sources should be encouraged. • Social-construction Theory (Vygotsky, 1978) • Social Interaction influences individual cognitive development. • Group and pair work should be encouraged.

4. Previous Studies on Student Interaction in Peer Review • Interaction is a complex process. • Three foci of studies investigating peer review interaction • social dynamics • cooperative and interactive; passive or even attacking others • Various factors affecting social dynamics: students’ language skills, their awareness of the purpose of the task, and their collaborator (De Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; Lockhart & Ng, 1995). • negotiation strategies • frequently used strategies: giving explanations (especially opinions), giving suggestions or advice, and generating new information based on discussion and text (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Riley, 1995; Villamil & De Guerrero, 1996). • Factors influencing the choice of strategies: reader/writer roles (De Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Villamil & De Guerrero, 2000), the extent of shared knowledge (Mendonca & Johnson, 1994), and reader stances (Lockhart & Ng, 1995) • discussion content • global and local issues of writing • Less proficient students pay more attention to local issues (Nelson & Murphy, 1992a, 1992b; Paulus, 1999; Villami & De Guerrero, 1998; Suzuki, 2006), whereas more proficient students focus more on global issues (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Riley, 1995). • However, research on the discussion content of language-related issues is either limited to the distinction between global and local issues (Mendonca & Johnson, 1994), or does not look at the details (Nelson & Murphy, 1992a).

5. Previous Studies on Student Interaction in Co-writing • Mainly focusing on dynamic patterns (Storch, 2001, 2002, 2003). • Most students were engaged and collaborative in the activity, but some interactions were non-collaborative. • This finding is similar to what is found in studies on peer review. • No research on co-writing has investigated the content of student discussion.

6. The Study • The current study addresses the research gaps in previous studies. • Co-writing has not received enough attention in SLA research (Nixon, 2007; Storch, 2005). • No research has compared peer review and co-writing.

7. Research Question • What kind of interaction occurs when students discuss their writing in peer review versus co-writing activities?

8. Study Design • A within-group design • three writing tasks • three writing conditions • a peer review condition • a co-writing condition • an individual writing condition • Students worked with the same partner in both peer review and co-writing conditions

9. Participants • 18 Chinese L2 learners • Higher beginner • Completed 90 hours of instruction • Meeting 6 hours • Ages: 19-23, and 27 • Gender: 11 Female, 7 male • First languages: English (7), Japanese (5), Thai (2); Cantonese (2), Korean (1), Cantonese/Spanish (1)

10. Timeframe of Writing Stages • 10 minutes pre-writing • 30 minutes writing • 15 minutes  revising

11. Data • Videorecordedscreen activities & audiorecordedinteractions • Student recorded verbal interaction was transcribed and coded. • 212.29 minutes • 147.34 minutes in the peer review condition • 64.95 minutes in the co-writing condition

12. Episodes • An episode:a stretch of discourse (a word, sentence, turn, or several turns) that is semantically related to a topic or purpose • (De Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; Nelson & Carson, 1998; Storch, 2001). • 816 episodes were segmented in the 27 transcripts. • on-, about-, and off-task episodes • An on-task episode is one in which students discuss their writings to complete the task. • (e.g., De Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; Storch, 2001; Villamil & De Guerrero, 1996).

13. An on-task episode (Original text: 她们说中国很漂亮，很好玩儿。) tamenshuoZhongguo hen piaoliang henhaowanr they-fem. say China very beautiful, very fun They say that China is very beautiful and a fun place. 1Kyoko:Maybe you can use 美丽 for 漂亮，but it still makes sense, right? meilipiaoliang beautiful beautiful 2 Sara:Like 美. mei beautiful 3Kyoko:Just the same thing, right? 4Sara:Yeah. (Sara, peer review)

14. On-task Episodes

15. Numbers of Episodes • 586 episodes in peer review interactions • 513 (87.5%) on-task episodes. • 230 episodes in co-writing interactions • 198 (86.1%) on-task episodes

16. Distribution of on-task episodes in peer review and co-writing

17. Paired samples t-tests: Total episodes, on-task episodes, LREs

18. Non-parametric test:IREs, CREs, TREs, and TAEs

19. Non-parametric test: LRE-lexis, LRE-grammar, LRE-mechanics

20. Non-parametric tests: Subcategories of LRE-lexis

21. Non-parametric tests:Subcategories of LRE-grammar

22. Non-parametric tests:Subcategories of LRE-mechanics

23. Discussions (1) • Results: a significantly more LREs and CREs in peer review than in co-writing • Students might have used different language forms and interpreted the pictures differently in the two conditions. • These differences, which arguably stem from individual writing practice, received attention in interaction because peers may have noticed errors, encountered linguistic forms unfamiliar to them, or needed to clarify the details of stimuli. On the other hand, in co-writing these differences were likely resolved or reduced through discussion at earlier stages of planning and writing.

24. Discussions (2) • Results: significantly more IREsand TAEs in co-writing than in peer review • Co-writing provided students with opportunities to constantly generate new ideas or synthesize ideas. This revision went beyond linguistic forms and extended to new ideas, which tended to contribute to more coherent and concise writing because revisions were made at the discourse level. • Students often made positive comments on the good quality of written texts or well-written linguistic items. • In co-writing, they were more satisfied with their co-constructed texts, or were more likely to assume ownership of the texts. • In peer review, many students felt reluctant to comment on their peers’ writing because of their low language proficiency level.

25. Discussions (3) • Results: Students focused significantly more on LRE-grammar and LRE-lexis in peer review than in co-writing, with no difference found on LRE-mechanics. • Students had different levels of mastery of the target language, despite being in the same class. • In peer review, many episodes involved students asking their peers for the meanings of vocabulary and sentences in their peers’ writing.

26. Discussions (4) • Existing research on the content of co-writing interactions (Storch, 2005) presents results that cannot be compared with those in the current study because in Storch (2005), the content of negotiation was examined throughout the whole process of writing, rather than in the revision stage exclusively. • While research on peer review and co-writing has also examined social dynamics (e.g., De Guerrero & Villamil, 1994; Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Storch, 2001, 2002, 2003) and negotiation strategies (Mendonca & Johnson, 1994; Nixon, 2007), few research studies have examined what students discuss in their interaction negotiations, and no study has compared the two collaborative activities of co-writing and peer review. • Thus, no research is available for a meaningful comparison with the findings on the nature of student interaction in the current study.

27. Conclusions • Peer review and co-writing play different roles in Chinese L2 learners’ development of writing skills, and thus are both important because they direct learners to different aspects of their language development. • In their verbal interactions, students attend more to verb forms, word usage, and spelling in peer review, and focus more on sentence structures, sentence expansions, and ideas in co-writing. • The seemingly complicated results suggest one thing: • Peer review and co-writing are two different collaborative writing activities, with no one definitely better than the other.

28. Thank you! Contact: Jun Tian jtian@uvic.ca