Effects Of Collaborative Prewriting Discussion On Chinese EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writing

Learning together and group achievements sharing are the common practices of collaborative learning in teaching foreign language writing.These collaborative learning practices help to motivate group students to make joint efforts so as to fulfill their learning tasks and attain their learning goals,but they are not very feasible in objectively observing group individuals’ dynamic writing progress.Consequently,current teaching and research of collaborative learning in foreign language writing begin to shift their focus to the effects of collaborative prewriting discussion on group members’respective developments of writing motivations,processes and abilities.Being a new teaching and research field in collaborative learning of foreign language writing,collaborative prewriting discussion has not yielded a substantial number of studies that failed to provide consistent research results and rarely paid due attention to the effects of written genres.Therefore the present study focused on the effects of collaborative prewriting discussion on Chinese EFL learners’ argumentative writingFollowing the theoretical framework of Zone of Proximal Development,this study tried to explore the effects of collaborative prewriting discussion on Chinese EFL learners’ argumentative writing in terms of the writing quality,complexity and fluency.Two classes of altogether 73 juniors majoring in English from a university in a city of Jiangsu Province,who had been upgraded from three-year college programs,participated in the study,of which one class of 37 students was chosen as the experimental class and the other of 36 was selected as the control class.The instruction of argumentative writing followed the Toulmin Model and the writing conditions for both classes were exactly the same,except that before writing the experimental class had collaborative prewriting discussion while the control class prepared for the writing individuallyThe results from the two-month long teaching experiment of collaborative prewriting discussion and Shehadeh’s research-based surveys indicated that firstly,collaborative prewriting discussion exerted significant effects on the overall quality of students’argumentative writing,particularly in content and organization,though no significant effects were obviously found on grammar,vocabulary and mechanics.Secondly,collaborative prewriting discussion had significant effects on the complexity of students’ argumentative writing,though no significant effects were clearly revealed on fluency.Finally,collaborative prewriting discussion was appreciatively welcomed by the survey participants who regarded collaborative prewriting discussion as an effective way for argumentative writing.The findings of the study might shed some light on the research and teaching of collaborative prewriting discussion in argumentative writing.Academically,this study is supposed to be a supplement to the relevant studies of collaborative prewriting discussion,tentatively confirming the promotion role of collaborative prewriting discussion on improving students’ argumentative writing quality.Pedagogically,the study tends to offer feasible references for the teachers of English writing to effectively conduct collaborative prewriting discussion.