Collaborative Writing Interactions In EFL Classroom

In recent years with language teaching focus shifting from teaching-centered to learning-centered, from teacher-centered to student-centered, the focus of teaching writing is shifting from product-based approach to process-based approach, and is popular with more and more teachers.The process-based approach offers an understanding of writing as a complex, creative, recursive, exploratory, and generative process. Its emphasis is no longer laid on the linguistic knowledge such as grammar and text structure, but on the writing process and the skills as planning, material-collecting, drafting, revising and checking. It favors offering learners a positive, encouraging, and collaborative group environment in order to help them develop writing strategies that allow them to discover and express their intended meaning. While collaborative writing offers students a productive, encouraging and cooperative environment in which through their communication and collaboration students can learn from each other in many aspects, including word choices, structure arrangement, and language use.Collaborative writing is well supported by two traditions: social constructionism and constructivism, among other theories. The former emphasizes students' discourse as a means of learning, and writing as a manifestation of internalized social interactions. Peer talk about writing takes advantage of Vygotsky's premise that speaking and writing are fundamentally social acts and that by collaborating on common text aloud, students can learn much more. Besides, peer talk about writing shows that they are constructing their knowledge on language and writing positively. The constructivism theory stresses cognitive process, and it argues that productive cognitive conflicts benefit students.Although there has recently been an increasingly interest in collaborative writing in the Western countries, educators and researchers have little information on how these writing groups function and how students interact within the collaborative writing groups. In this thesis, through the author's study of three coauthoring groups in the biology-base class in the College of Life Science, Shaanxi Normal University, the author tries to provide some insights into successful collaborative writing interactions and fill the gap in this field.Based on both quantitative and qualitative data, this study advanced four factors that affect the success of collaborative writing groups in EFL classroom. These four factors include (a) coauthoring strategies, (b) dialogic engagement, (c) cognitive conflict,and (d) social factors. The discourse of three coauthoring triads-a potential group, amodel group, and an assigned group-were examined to determine these factors.These four factors also differentiated the model group from the other two groups. Conclusions were reached that successful college coauthors were involved in an authentic conversation about emerging text and worked with each other productively. They prompted each other to generate ideas, plan effectively, engage in discussions of thought, and evaluate their choices at the word, structure and idea levels.At last, on the basis of the study on the collaborative writing interactions, this thesis put forward some suggestions on applying collaborative writing in EFL classroom for foreign language teachers. The author believed that collaborative writing could offer a bridge connecting students' spoken expression and written one. It is expected that collaborative writing not only improves college students' writing ability in the long run, but also improves their comprehensive language ability and their social communication ability as well.