The Application Of Collaborative Pre-writing Planning In Senior High School Students' Writing

Among four basic skills,writing is an important reflection of learners' language proficiency.However,in our country,traditional English writing class is usually carried out as “teacher assigning topic-student writing-teacher correcting”,which is a time-consuming and inefficient teaching model.As it turned out,students' writing ability could not be improved and their interest in writing was gradually lost.Collaborative writing,inspired by sociocultural theory,is widely gaining attention.With researchers having confirmed its positive effect on students' written output,many teachers blamed it for consuming longer time and its unfair assessment.Collaborative pre-writing planning,which employs collaboration and meanwhile provides independent writing opportunity,has undoubtedly become a possible substitute.Though there were many studies focusing on the impact of collaborative writing or individual pre-writing planning on students' writing texts,few studies explored the similarities or differences between collaborative writing and collaborative pre-writing planning.Based on this,this study aims to investigate whether the benefits of undertaking collaborative writing can be extended to collaborative pre-writing planning task.In line with this purpose,three questions were proposed:(1).Is there any difference in the overall quality as well as linguistic features of the texts written by Chinese senior high school EFL students under three different conditions: collaborative writing,collaborative pre-writing planning,and no collaboration?(2).Is there difference in the type as well as amount of peer talk that occurs during collaborative writing and collaborative pre-writing planning tasks?(3).What is the potential relationship between peer interaction and students' texts written under collaborative pre-writing planning condition?There are 72 students participating in this research from two nature classes froma key senior high school in Zhejiang Province,China.After several pseudo practices of CW(collaborative writing)and CPP(collaborative pre-writing planning)tasks,they were finally divided into two experimental groups(CW group and CPP group)and one control group(no Collaboration)according to the students' preferences.Pairs in the CW group worked collaboratively throughout the writing process;students in the CPP group worked together to complete the pre-writing task,then separated to write independently;students in the NC group planned and wrote independently.The experiment lasted for 9 weeks,including pre-test and post-test.Texts quality is measured by overall score,writing accuracy,complexity and fluency.Student talk,based on its content nature,is operationalized as different episodes,including content,organization,language,task management and off-task.The results showed that,firstly,there was no significant difference in the overall score and writing fluency among three groups,but CW group had a better performance in accuracy than the other two groups;while for complexity,CPP group was significantly superior to the other two.To some extent,this result reflected the trade-off effect between complexity and accuracy.Secondly,for the nature of student interaction in the planning stage,this study revealed that the CPP group had significantly more discussion about the content,organization and language,whereas the CW group discussed more about the management of writing task.Finally,only one positive correlation was found between the mean clause per T-unit(a measure of complexity)and previous peer discussion on content in CPP group.This study concludes though the benefits of collaborative writing in language accuracy weren't suggested in collaborative pre-writing planning task,it does have its advantage in stimulating more content output.We tend to believe collaborative pre-writing planning task,making parts of the advantages of collaboration but attaching emphasis to students' independent writing ability,is a more feasible writing practice.