A Study Of Patterns Of Interaction And Students' Attitudes Towards Collaboration In Chinese EFL Writing

In the past several decades,collaboration in writing tasks in the form of prewriting discussion in the planning phase,peer feedback in the revision phase and in particular collaborative writing has become the research hotspot in the field of second language writing.A few studies have ever compared the effectiveness of prewriting discussion and collaborative writing,whereas limited research has ever compared peer feedback and collaborative writing.Besides,relevant research has evidenced that students'attitudes towards collaboration in writing tasks are underexamined and reported the mutual influences of students' attitudes and patterns of interaction.Therefore,this study intends to explore the differences in patterns of interaction that Chinese EFL students follow in the collaborative writing task and the individual writing with collaboration task,students' attitudes to collaboration involved in the two writing tasks and how patterns of interaction are linked to students' attitudes towards collaboration.To achieve the research objectives,a total of 20 English major students from a comprehensive university in Shandong Province participated in this study.The transcribed pair talk,observation notes,pre-task survey,post-task survey and transcribed semi-structured interviews constituted all sources of data,which were analyzed based on a qualitative approach.The results of this study are as follows:firstly,four distinct patterns of interaction were identified in the two writing tasks:the collaborative pattern,the dominant/dominant pattern,the dominant/passive pattern and the expert/novice pattern.Eight out of 10 pairs of participants followed the different patterns of interaction in the two writing tasks.In the collaborative writing task,Pairs 3,4,6 and 10 followed the collaborative pattern;Pairs 2,5 and 7 displayed the dominant/dominant pattern;Pairs 1 and 8 presented the dominant/passive pattern and Pair 9 formed the expert/novice pattern.In the individual writing with collaboration task,Pairs 1,2,4,7 and 10 followed the collaborative pattern;Pairs 9 and 5 exhibited respectively the dominant/dominant and dominant/passive patterns;Pairs 3,6 and 8 belonged to the expert/novice pattern.Secondly,almost all students held positive attitudes towards collaboration involved in the two writing tasks due to its benefits in improving the nature of their written texts from the aspects of content,organization,grammar and vocabulary.Yet,there existed a divergence that nine out of 20 participants showed their preferences for collaborative writing whereas eight out of 20 participants demonstrated favorable attitudes towards individual writing with collaboration.The rest three participants embraced the ambivalent and contradictory attitudes.Thirdly,the links between patterns of interaction and students' attitudes towards collaboration have been revealed.By taking two case participants as example,patterns of interaction to some extent led to the change of students' original attitudes towards collaboration in writing tasks.By taking all participants into consideration,in the collaborative writing task,the collaborative pattern was strongly linked to students'positive attitudes towards collaborative writing;the three non-collaborative patterns had a powerful connection with students' negative attitudes towards collaboration writing.In the individual writing with collaboration task,the link of the collaborative pattern to students' attitudes towards individual writing with collaboration was not so powerful as the case of collaborative writing.The link of the three non-collaborative patterns to students'attitudes towards individual writing with collaboration was as powerful as the case of collaborative writing.However,there were also exceptions.For some participants,instead of patterns of interaction,their perceptions about the benefits and problems of collaborative writing and individual writing with collaboration shaped their attitudes towards collaborative writing and individual writing with collaboration.Finally,this study provides pedagogical implications for EFL writing teachers in classroom practices and theoretical insights for collaborative writing researchers.It is suggested that teachers may implement the two writing tasks,especially collaborative writing and instruct students to follow the collaborative pattern of interaction.In the end,limitations of this study and suggestions for future research are presented.