Teaching EFL through task repetition and collaborative writing

Abstract

A small number of studies have dealt with the effects of implementing task repetition (TR) together with collaborative writing (CW) with students of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Compulsory Secondary Education (CSE) (Wigglesworth & Storch, 2012). Scholars have frequently and profusely studied TR and CW as independent tools (Ahmadian et al, 2017; Fukuta, 2016; Manchón, 2014; Van de Guchte, 2016). However, little is known about the potential of these two constructs when together combined in the EFL classroom. The current study has carried out an experiment with a group of CSE students, who worked in pairs to repeat the same narrative task (exact TR) through two consecutive weeks. Two research questions have been the starting point for this study; (1) whether learners’ collaborative writings improve their quality when the same story is written twice, and (2) what learners talk about when they produce a writing task together. The results have shown that they improve the accuracy and fluency of their productions but they do not increase the complexity of the text produced. The students focus on content in the first enactment, but their attention shifts to form during the second attempt; that is, they do not seem to be able to focus on various aspects of the language learning process at the same time, as Skehan’s (1998) trade-off hypothesis claims. Moreover, the Language Related Episodes (LREs) show that students mainly speak about grammar and vocabulary, and that they are able to cooperate, discuss and share their ideas. Therefore, these old but, at the same time, new teaching procedures might provide CSE students of EFL with new learning alternatives. Further researches might vary some of the patterns of the experiment in order to inform teaching practices with greater precision