Collaborative pre-writing effects on the quality of individual and collaborative texts

Abstract

Collaborative writing (CW) has been widely used in second language (L2) classrooms to enhance the quality of students’ written texts. However, the effects prewriting collaborative planning has on the quality of the written texts has received little attention. Therefore, the current study contrasts texts planned in collaboration but composed individually and in pairs in an attempt to explore the effects of pair planning and of writing in pairs. The study included two Spanish EFL classes (aged 12-13) that had to write three opinion essays: a pre-test, where students planned and wrote the essays individually; an experimental task were students were divided into two groups: a collaborative text group (CTG, n=24) who planned and wrote the text in pairs and an individual text group (ITG, n=20) who planned in collaboration but wrote the text individually; and a final post-test where all students planned and wrote the essays individually. Texts were compared for complexity, accuracy, and fluency measures, as well as for qualitative measures of adequacy, coherence, cohesion, grammatical accuracy, lexical range and mechanics. Results revealed that planning together was beneficial, but CTG obtained slightly higher means for accuracy and qualitative measures which indicated that writing in pairs was more beneficial than writing on their own. The comparison of pre and post-test also showed similar advantages for CTG. Complexity and fluency, however, did not vary much across tasks and conditions. Findings suggest that writing and planning in collaboration is advantageous for L2 learning as it promotes text quality, and helps young students to improve their writing skills.