The Effect Of Collaboration On Chinese EFL Learners’ Lexical Learning

From both a cognitive and a sociocultural perspective, the study investigates the impact of collaboration on Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language) learners’ lexical learning by comparing the lexical learning effect of collaborative writing and that of individual writing. Specifically, three research questions(RQs) are addressed:1) To what extent does Chinese EFL learners’ collaborative writing lead to better lexical learning than their individual writing?2) What types of cognitive word processing do Chinese EFL collaborative writers and individual writers engage themselves in?3) To what extent can Chinese EFL collaborative and individual writers’ lexical learning be attributed to their word processing?41 English major sophomores from two intact classes participated in the study.They formed two groups, one group with 22 of them and the other group with 19. The two groups were required to respectively complete a collaborative writing task and an individual writing task by using the words provided. The individual writers were asked to do think-aloud throughout their writing in order to balance the language modality and to capture their word processing. The dialogues or monologues resulting from the two groups’ task performances were all audio-recorded so as to examine their target word use. Four productive and respective vocabulary posttests were administered to all the participants respectively immediately, one week, two weeks,and three weeks after their task performance.The data analysis revealed the following findings:1) Individual writing led to higher scores than collaborative writing did on all the four productive and receptive vocabulary posttests. Yet significant differences were only observed on the productive posttests 3 and 4;2) Both collaborative writing and individual writing engendered three types of word processing(word repetition, word metatalk, and word generation). Althoughsome commonalities were found in each type of word processing derived from the two tasks, lots of differences still existed in the three types of word processing. In addition, collaborative writing brought about significantly more word processing than individual writing did in terms of both overall and each type of word processing;3) For both groups, no significant correlations were observed between their productive or receptive word learning and word processing.The research findings of the study provide theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical implications for L2 lexical research, teaching or learning. Theoretically, it is advisable that L2 lexical research be carried out from both cognitive and sociocultural perspectives in order to obtain more comprehensive results.Methodologically, the study implies that the results of L2 lexical research can be obtained by adopting think-aloud protocols to balance the language modalities involved, examining both the learning outcome and the learning process, as well as conducting both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Pedagogically, the findings of the study shed some light on predicament of L2 English lexical teaching and learning.Specifically, EFL learners should use newly-learned words in both oral and written output in order to achieve efficient and effective lexical learning; teachers and learners should value both collaborative work and individual work in lexical learning since both of them are beneficial for lexical learning.