چکیده:
This study purported to comparatively investigate the influence of collaborative writing on the quality of individual writing of four female Iranian and four female Malaysian students. The first semester students at a private university in Malaysia, who were comparable in terms of age, gender, study discipline, and language proficiency, were divided into two Iranian and two Malaysian dyads. The dyads performed collaborative writing tasks for 15 sessions; after three consecutive collaborative writing sessions, each participant was asked to individually attempt a writing task. Both collaborative and individual writing tasks comprised isomorphic graphic prompts (IELTS Academic Module task 1). Writing quality of the five individually-produced texts during the study was rated in terms of task achievement (TA), cohesion/coherence (C/C), grammatical range/accuracy (GR/A), and lexical resources (LR). The findings indicated a hierarchy of development in TA and C/C among all the students, while LR showed minor improvement only among three of Malaysian students, and GR/A barely exhibited any progress among everyone. Intermittent progressions and regressions were also discerned in the trajectory of their writing development. The findings are discussed in the light of the socio-cultural and emergentist perspectives, the typology of tasks used as well as the role of the participants’ level of language proficiency.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Writing quality of the five individually-produced texts during the study was rated in terms of task achievement (TA), cohesion/coherence (C/C), grammatical range/accuracy (GR/A), and lexical resources (LR).
Drawing upon the theoretical position of social constructivists like Bakhtin (1981), Halliday (1978), Vygotsky (1978) who all discuss language and learning as processes of meaning-making and social activity, the advocates of a dialogic view of writing perceive writing as a socio- contextual phenomenon and support the essential role of conversation and consultation in collaborative writing.
Researchers have foregrounded the significance of the symmetrical structure of power distribution in groups to the extent that they have raised it as a strong determinant of successful collaborative development, arguing that the symmetrical configuration of groups in terms of power relations can facilitate the dynamics of interactional engagements and affective relations of the peers (Norton & Toohey, 2001).
For instance, the use of peer revision, which is the most prevalent mode of collaborative writing (O'Brien, 2004; Storch, 2005), has been criticized on the grounds that during peer revisions students tend to focus on lexico-syntactic level issues, rather than on important revising issues (Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Nelson & Carson, 1998; Villamil & Guerrero, 1996).
Numerous scholars (Daiute, 1986; Dobao, 2012; Ede & Lunsford, 1990; Storch, 2011, 2013; Wells, Chang, & Maher, 1990) support and argue for the collaborative engagement of students throughout the entire writing process (i.