The Effects of Collaborative Writing to Learners’ Text in terms of Writing Accuracy from Sociocultural Theory Perspective

Collaborative Writing (CW) has stimulated scholars for years in order to shed light on the effects of this kind of activity, and in terms of writing fluency, some researchers succeeded in stating that writing in groups affects the quality of learners' texts. Nevertheless, the previous studies have not provided fully spotlight on the field of utilizing grammar and vocabulary correctly when students compose text with peers. The purpose of this study was to review the effects of CW to the learners’ work in terms of accuracy from the perspective of Sociocultural Theory (SCT).

Schreibflüssigkeit im Medienvergleich: Handschrift – Tastaturschreiben – Diktieren mit Spracherkennung

Fluency is considered an essential prerequisite for successful text production. Writing fluency means mastering the basic processes of writing so that cognitive resources are freed up to concentrate on content planning or revision when writing texts. Although the importance of these basic processes is well known, there has been little research on this in a German language context. What is known, however, is that digital technologies can support written production. Compared to handwriting, typing is less demanding in terms of motor skills, for example. Dictation in conjunction with speech recognition in turn supports text production not only in the area of motor execution, but also in the area of spelling. In order to capture the characteristics and currently possible potential of dictation with speech recognition, this study investigated this input mode and contrasted it with handwriting and typing in a writing fluency test (N = 46, 8th grade). The results show that the participants produce longer and more correct texts with the help of dictation with speech recognition than when handwriting or typing. However, there is also evidence that this new form of text production has its own challenges.

Collaborative Writing on Google Docs: Taiwanese Students’ Participation, Behaviors, and Writing Trajectories with Real-work Online Tasks

In the past two decades, the growing rage of computer mediated environments (CMC) affords new literacies and new opportunities for language learners to experience, construct, communicate, and access knowledge (Ware, Kern & Warschauer, 2016). Also, it suggests that writing in multimodal in the digital ear contributes to its production and interpretation (Canagarajah, 2013) and can be particularly beneficial for L2 learners’ writing practices (Elola & Oskoz, 2010) such as writing quality (Stroch, 2005), writing fluency (Bloch, 2007), academic voices (Sperling & Appleman, 2011) and a sense of audience (Sun & Chang, 2012). Google Docs and online text-chat systems are prominent collaborative tools for group writing, and the result shows that the focus group displayed a mixed-interaction pattern, a collaborative pattern in two online text-chat systems, and a more dominant-passive pattern while co-constructing the text. They study also explored that changing the mode of communication from Line to Google Docs chat-room appears to have led to an increase in the participants’ interaction and communication and seems to have facilitated collaboration. Participants make a significant contribution of two types of writing changing functions, adding and correcting in the text and make revisions to their text.

Graded Readers: An Empirical Study Measuring the Impact on Low-Proficiency EFL Students’ Writing Fluency in Morocco

The writing ability of Moroccan students is generally characterized by low language fluency. This article examines the impact of the implementation of graded readers as a syllabus intervention alternative rather than the textbook-based approach regarding teaching writing skill. The research design for this study is a mixed method. The qualitative method was twofold, in-class and online. The first tool was conducted via a series of observations and structured discussions with students. Likewise, the second tool was conducted through online forum interactions between the students one another and students with their instructor so as to measure their perceptions on the use of graded readers as a new method of dealing with the writing skill in preparation for the formative assessment quiz. Microsoft Teams platform, commissioned by the Ministry of Education, was used as a complementary medium to enhance in-class discussions where students are required to answer some open-ended questions. On the other hand, the quantitative method was used to measure the students’ outcomes by using the Rubric Calculator Software issued by Smekenseducation.com. The findings of this study demonstrate that the use of graded readers to improve the writing fluency was encouraging according to the positive results obtained from the analyzed data regardless of the time restrictions. The paper is concluded with several recommendations for more research in the field of study and the requirements needed for the best implementation of this creative method to boost the learners’ writing fluency.