Abstract:
The current study investigated the effect of collaborative prewriting activities on learners’ identity construction and L2 writing development. To this end, 43 sophomore upper-intermediate university students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at an Iranian university who had enrolled in a course called Advanced Writing were randomly divided into two experimental groups (groups A and B) and one control group (group C). While the students in group A were involved in group activities, the students in group B were engaged in pair activities. The students in control group (group C) worked individually. As a pre-test, a pen-and-paper writing task was given to all the students at the beginning of the semester. During the semester, all the participants were exposed to the same materials and were taught by the same teacher for one semester. The only difference was the type of activities in which the participants were engaged. At the end of one semester, a pen-and-paper writing task was given to all the three groups. The findings of the post-test revealed that all the students could significantly improve their writing skills. Nevertheless, the students in group B significantly outperformed their counterparts. Most importantly, the results of identity analysis showed that the students in group A used authorial plural pronouns along with adjectives more frequently. The findings of this study confirmed two issues: first, the significant efficacy of prewriting activities were confirmed at the end of the semester. Second, each type of prewriting activity could affect the learners’ identity construction
Machine summary:
"Similarly, there was no significant difference among the performances of the students in different groups regarding the number of first person plural pronouns and adjectives which the participants had used in their pre-test writing tasks (Table 5).
The findings of this study confirm the results of earlier studies in which students significantly perform better when they were engaged in group activities (see Elola & Oskoz, 2010; Storch, 2005) or pair work (see Kim, 2008) than they performed the tasks individually.
In addition to different influences of various grouping systems on language learning (writing skills in this paper), the findings of this study revealed that these activities may have different effects on identity construction.
Based on the results of this study, the students in group B were successful in improving their writing tasks, because working in pairs enabled them to interact and collaborate with each other and receive feedback that pertains to appropriate word choice, tense, article, verb form pluralization, word order, mechanics, rhetorical patterns, discourse markers, etc.
The results of the students writing tasks on the pre-test regarding the use of plural and singular first person pronouns and possessive adjectives indicated that there was no significant difference among students in the three different groups (see Tables 4 and 5).
Care should be exercised by teachers before beginning a writing class, where students are supposed to engage in different types of activities, because group activities unconsciously and gradually influence students to construct individual or collective identities and represent them in subsequent turns."