Students cooperation and attention to form in a collaborative writing project

Editor's Notes

• #4: ICT are omnipresent in professional and ordinary life; They influence how we read and write, how we learn and teach; The way that we observe literacy development is also changing. Finnally, the use of ICT tools is now so popular in teaching and learning environments that the plethora of research keeps growing in size and variety.
• #5: Collaborative learning: two or more people learn or attempt to learn something together people engaged in collaborative learning capitalize on one another’s resources and skills (asking one another for information, evaluating one another’s ideas, monitoring one another’s work, etc.). Communities of practice a group of people who share a craft and/or a profession. The group can evolve naturally because of the members' common interest in a particular domain or area, or it can be created specifically with the goal of gaining knowledge related to their field. It is through the process of sharing information and experiences with the group that the members learn from each other, and have an opportunity to develop themselves personally and professionally. A aprendizagem ocorre em contextos sociais que surgem e evoluem quando as pessoas que têm objetivos comuns interagem como eles se esforçam para esses objetivos.
• #6: According to Wikipedia, the term collaborative writing refers to work created by a group collaboratively rather than by one person individually. Collaborative writing is useful for projects, for peer-editing, and for many other writing tasks limited only by teacher/student imagination. David Farkas (1991) offeres 4 possible definitions: Two or more people jointly composing the complete text of a document; Two or more people contributing to a document; One or more person, modifying by editing and/or reviewing, the document of one or more persons; and, One person working interactively with one or more people and drafting a document based on the ideas of the person or persons (Farkas, 1991:14). Collaborative writing activities types : Co-writing; Co-publishing; Co-responding; Co-editing; Writing-helping. “Researchers have found that collaborative writing contributes to an increased complexity in writing and willingness to utilize peer feedback (Sotillo, 2002) as well as increased grammatical accuracy and overall quality of writing (Storch, 2005).” (Kessler, 2009: 80) Kessler (2009:80) argued that through the act of collaboration, students are exposed to valuable input from others (Vygotsky, 1962), encouraged to produce enhanced output (Oxford, 1997), given more opportunity for practice (Ortega, 2007), and provide effective linguistic feedback for themselves and peers (Vygotsky, 1978).
• #7: “Google docs is probably the most popular of these tools. It is a free service allowing users to create both word and spreadsheet documents for colaboration. The best part is that there is no need to install any software. Students and teachers access their work from anywhere, on any internet-enabled computer whether at home, at school, at the local library, etc.” (http://www.techlearning.com/article/8906, em 13/07/2009). .
• #8: Many web-based writing tools have features that mimic the typical formatting and editing facilities of a standard word processor. Some may offer live chat, live annotation, co-editing, and version tracking. Collaborating students do not need to be in the same room, or even the same school/city/state/country. And their work, usually password-protected. So a student, or team of students, may begin work on a school computer and continue working after the school day on any other Web-enabled computer.
• #9: Research on collaborative learning is generally focused on tools like wiki or blogs, integrating them into educational settings. For our research, we prefer Google Docs for two reasons. Firstly, it’s a very useful friendly web tool, and for the students, at the time, there was no need to register in another web page to access another OTP tool. Secondly, we want to experiment the possibilities of this tool on educational context, more precisely in cooperation classroom activities . Google Docs is a free online document editor which allows users to upload text documents, presentations, and spreadsheets previously created on a traditional office suite. It also provides a work platform, similar to those traditional office suites, where we can directly create, edit and publish. One of the best characteristics of Google Docs is the possibility to share the document with other users. In fact, a small group can view and edit the same document in real time. They also can discuss the work in progress through the chat room available in the same web page, i.e., there is no need to have more programs in use (MSN or Skype) and switch every time from the chat to the document. Furthermore, in a long time project, this OPT tool include a history files page, where the co-workers can view the different changes made and reverse, if necessary, with one click, to one of them.
• #10: This study aimed at answering the following research questions: to what degree these French students work collaboratively in an autonomous environment; what kind of changes they discuss during the task, and; how the live-chat help us to understand about students’ attitude concerning this kind of activities. methodology the study was administered to an undergraduate course, during the academic year of 2009/2010 and envolves … intermediate level (B1) Their ages ranged from 21-39 years old. The class had 8 girls and 3 men. Two of them were on sick-leave at the time, but they were really motivated for the task and worked from home with their work-group.
• #11: For the collaborative writing task, we asked students, on small groups, to write news. They had to plan and choose the subject and style according to the newspaper they selected as a possible target to publish their work. We also required that they included title, subtitles, and illustration(s). Additionally, students had to edit the text like if it was to be published in a real newspaper. The length of the text was fixed around 150 words. No face-to-face communication: they should use Google chat instead. Finally, they had to submit the text and a copy of the chat in the Moodle platform.
• #12: We analysed the interactions looking for language related episodes (LRE) coded according to the following: Form/content: was used to refer to interactions / revisions that seemed to focus on form with some additional, often minor, alteration to the content of the text; Content/form: was used to refer to interactions / revisions that seemed to focus on content with some additional, often minor, alteration to the form of the text. Work regulation: presence of task division for instance; Monitoring: participant controling the work of the team or of another participant.
• #13: Collaborative work They felt the necessity to frequently control each other; they did not assign tasks; and they had more difficulties to focus on work. Even if they already knew each other’s, it seems that they did not develop a proficient level of interdependence; that means all the members should focus simultaneously on the task target and feel confident to correct another member, if that help the overall work. Focus on content Vs focus on form The overall tendency among groups was to focus on meaning rather than form. They are students of a foreign language (level B1 of the European frame, but with many language difficulties), I thought that they will pay more attention in form, negotiating language input for the text and not what subject and how to develop it, but it was the opposite. They mostly discuss the content and not the form. The content revision and writing is simultaneously made. They evaluated the subject at the same time they are writing, asking the peers if a particular content fragment is in the best place or if it should be somewhere else. At the end, the final text had problems concerning the coherence, certainly because when they wrote, they did not see the text as a whole.
• #14: Most of the revising work, such as “spelling”, was proposed by the “author” and not to intentionally correct a peer. They have more willingness to edit their own production rather than their colleagues. Most of the revising work was proposed by the “author” and not to intentionally correct a peer. The participants on this study only correct their peers if they notice a problem on subject/verb agreement. All the reviewing proposals were about words (spelling or word choice) that could generate ambiguity or have some homonymous.
• #15: Concerning the accuracy of their explicit attention to form (Table 3) we can conclude that they were effective. Nevertheless, the texts sent to the professor include spelling and subject / verb agreement mistakes, punctuation, coordination, article problems and prepositions’ choice as well. It seams that they were not confident enough to edit peer’s posts or to ask their colleagues if what they wrote was grammatically correct. However, it is clear that readers understand the meaning of the text. It appears then that they are conscious about their tolerance about the form. Perhaps the students needed more support: they probably needed to be oriented on how to work in small groups, or, probably to receive more grammar instructions.
• #16: It appears that the students show a kind of tolerance regarding form, focusing on content. The form’s LRE concerned only the structure of the text and not the language structures like if they do not want to expose themselves, or to correct their colleagues. They are confident about the topic, they negotiated it and how to structure it but they not comment the language. it seems they need to develop more skills on working simultaneously with peers. From this work we conclude that there is a need to educate students on how to negotiate meanings, content and form, discuss items with colleagues, and even on how to correct their peers in order to achieve a common goal. The students need to develop more metacognitive strategies in order to attain a better autonomous work Students were motivated to work collaboratively; The use of ICT increased the interest because the same tool was used to research content, communicate, work collaboratively, etc. Their conversations on the recorded live-chat were very surprising, including discussions about when they could use the online tools again for others group-work, or with abundant positive adjectives and descriptive reactions about the tool in use during the project.
• #17: Although these results cannot be generalized to a larger group of students, they cannot be underestimated since some results are consistent with the available literature. Finally, it should be opportune to replicate the study with a larger number of participants from different language backgrounds and contexts in order to enhance the conclusions.