Elsevier

System

Volume 41, Issue 3, September 2013, Pages 752-769
System

Individual novices and collective experts: Collective scaffolding in wiki-based small group writing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2013.07.021Get rights and content

Abstract

This article reports on a case study that explored the process of wiki-based collaborative writing in a small group of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students at a Chinese university. The study examined the archived logs from the group wiki ‘Discussion’ and ‘History’ modules with a focus on the group members' scaffolded interaction when co-constructing texts in the wiki space. The analysis revealed that the participants were actively engaged in reciprocal communication in terms of content discussion, social talk, task management, technical communication and language negotiation. They were also found to have scaffolded each other's writing efforts during co-constructing the product via multiple writing change functions, including addition, deletion, rephrasing, reordering and correction. This study explicated a distinct case of ‘collective scaffolding’ (Donato, 1994) in collaborative writing activities, where group members were simultaneously individual novices and collective experts as they pooled their knowledge and mutually guided each other through problem solving as to writing tasks. This study has important implications for instruction and future research on computer-mediated collaborative writing.

Introduction

Collaborative writing, known as plural authors producing a singular text (Ede and Lunsford, 1990), has been increasingly implemented in second language classes during this decade (e.g., Dobao, 2012, Elola and Oskoz, 2010, Kessler and Bikowski, 2010, Mak and Coniam, 2008, Storch, 2002, Storch, 2005, Watanabe, 2008). Informed by social constructivism, collaborative writing allows multiple writers to co-author and jointly produce a written text and thus encourages scaffolded performance throughout the writing process. Recently, with the development of Web 2.0 technology, the wiki has been gaining growing attention as a medium for group writing due to its ‘intensely collaborative’ nature (Godwin-Jones, 2003, p. 15). Previous research (e.g., Lee, 2010, Lundin, 2008) reported that the affordance of wikis eases collaborative process, facilitates interaction, and supports student writing development. Despite the initial acknowledgment that wikis enhance collaboration, continual revision and collective language production (Lund, 2008, Purdy, 2009), research involving the revision process as it occurs in wikis ‘has just begun to scratch the surface’ (Ducate et al., 2011, p. 515), and ‘there is still a lack of clarity of the nature of wiki collaboration’(Storch, 2011, p. 285). Therefore, this study aims to explore students' collective scaffolding, particularly their task/meaning negotiation and joint construction of texts, during wiki-based group writing activities.

Collaborative writing dates back to the 1980s, with the wide recognition of knowledge as a social construction and writing as a social process (Ede and Lunsford, 1990). In recent decades, interaction within the collaborative writing task environment has become a popular research topic, supported by sociocultural theory which posits that learning is a socially constructed process through interaction. Vygotsky (1978) noted that language and social interaction facilitate learning in the learner's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), defined as ‘the distance between the actual development level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers’ (p. 86). Warchauer (1997) later examined computer-mediated interaction in second language classes, and argued that ‘collaborative learning, either among students or between students and a teacher, is essential for assisting each student in advancing through his or her own zone of proximal development’ (p. 471).

A construct associated with ZPD that is widely cited in collaborative writing literature is scaffolding (e.g., Donato, 1994, Lee, 2010, Li and Zhu, 2013, Storch, 2005). Wood et al. (1976) originally referred to scaffolding as a metaphor for a mother's verbal efforts to maintain conversation with her child to indirectly foster language acquisition. Scaffolds involve adult ‘controlling those elements of the task that are initially beyond the learner's capability, thus permitting him to concentrate upon and complete only those elements that are within his range of competence’ (Wood et al., 1976, p. 90). Although scaffolding initially described the carefully attuned assistance from adults to children, much L2 research (Anton and DiCamilla, 1998, Donato, 1994, Ohta, 2000, Swain and Lapkin, 1998) has demonstrated that scaffolding can occur among peers, when they collaborate via group/pair work.

One prominent application of scaffolding to L2 acquisition is in Donato's studies (Donato, 1988, Donato, 1994), where he identified mutual scaffolding among L2 learners. He proposed ‘collective scaffolding’ to illustrate how learning took place via peer interaction. In the occurrence of collective scaffolding, ‘the speakers are at the same time individually novices and collectively experts, sources of new orientations for each other and guides through this complex linguistic problem solving’ (Donato, 1994, p. 46). With ‘collective orientation to jointly constructed activity’ (Donato, 2004, p. 287), students accomplished higher levels of performance than they might achieve by working on their own.

Previous research has revealed a number of benefits of collaborative writing. In the L1 writing context, collaborative writing was found to provide the students with certain resources not accessible to students performing solitary writing (Bruffee, 1993). For example, students can assume multiple roles which are unique in the collaborative writing activity: that of tutor, sounding board, and critical reader (Weissberg, 2006). Also, considering writing as an emergent and social process, researchers (Higgins et al., 1992, Keys, 1994) argued that collaborative writing is a way to foster reflective thinking, especially if learners are engaged in the act of explaining and defending their ideas to their peers. In the L2 context, Swain (2000) posited that collaborative writing pushed students to negotiate the language use and collaborate in the solution of linguistic problems. This perspective was echoed in many L2 research studies (e.g., DiCamilla and Anton, 1997, Storch, 2002, Swain and Lapkin, 1998) where learners, in the process of co-authoring, took into account not only grammatical accuracy and lexis but also writing discourse. As Storch (2005) described, collaborative writing promotes a sense of co-ownership and hence, encourages students to contribute to decision making on various aspects of writing. Furthermore, Hirvela (1999) detected students' linguistic gains after they conducted collaborative writing tasks, and the outcome was attributed to the opportunities that collaborative writing offered the students to reflect and effectively apply what they had learned.

Due to the above-mentioned benefits, collaborative writing is increasingly implemented in L2 classrooms. Particularly, the use of collaborative writing tasks in online L2 writing contexts is expanding and will grow in the future given recent developments in Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) technology (Kessler et al., 2012).

As Kessler and Bikowski (2010) stated, ‘the evolution of collaborative writing maybe intrinsically connected with the iterations of technology since new developments provide new opportunities for collaboration’ (p. 43). In the CMC context, writing is moving in the direction of ‘a more social construction of the activity and interactivity of writing’ (Pennington, 2003, p. 304). CMC tools allow students to contribute at their own time and pace and also enable them to practice their writing skills in a non-threatening environment (Colomb and Simutis, 1996). Ware and Warschauer (2006) argued that ‘asynchronous discussion formats, in particular, are believed to combine the interactive aspect of written conversations with the reflective nature of composing’ (p.111). The wiki, an asynchronous CMC tool, is acclaimed as a medium naturally suited for online collaborative writing projects (Godwin-Jones, 2003).

The wiki is a collaborative web site that allows users to freely create and edit the contents of web pages. It has three defining modules that greatly afford collaborative writing: ‘Edit,’ ‘History,’ and ‘Discussion’.1 ‘Edit’ enables the users to freely write and revise writing on wiki pages; ‘History’ reveals all the changes the page has gone through with the color coding of deleted and inserted texts; ‘Discussion’ allows the users to negotiate writing tasks and meanings via asynchronous posting (Li, 2012a). Owing to these intrinsically collaborative features, learners are expected to embrace collaboration more readily in wiki-based collaborative writing projects (Storch, 2011). How students actually collaborate in joint wiki writing activities, however, deserves close investigation.

The current body of literature has begun to examine students' wiki writing process, primarily the revising behaviors of writing groups (e.g., Arnold et al., 2012, Kessler and Bikowski, 2010, Kost, 2011, Mak and Coniam, 2008). For instance, Mak and Coniam (2008) found that ESL secondary school students were involved with four types of writing change functions, i.e., adding ideas, expanding ideas, reorganizing ideas and correcting errors when they co-produced a school brochure to be distributed to their parents. A focused description of one small group's revising behaviors revealed that the students contributed to group writing by mostly adding new ideas, and they paid insufficient attention to error correction. Later, Kessler and Bikowski (2010) conducted a wiki project in a large class of EFL pre-service teachers who synthesized the course contents about culture in the wiki environment. The researchers identified five types of attention-to-meaning revising behaviors, which they called language acts (i.e., new information, deleted information, clarification/elaboration of information, synthesis of information and web links). Extending the taxonomy of revision types, Kost (2011) reported both meaning-related changes (e.g., addition, deletion and substitution) and formal changes (e.g., spelling, word order, lexical revisions and punctuation) that German as a Foreign Language college students made during wiki-based collaborative writing activities. Results indicated that the students were much more frequently engaged in formal changes than meaning changes.

The other emerging line of research concerning collaborative writing process discussed patterns of interaction. Bradley et al. (2010) analyzed the archived wiki records and identified different patterns of interaction over the course of text co-construction among pairs or small groups of EFL students in an ESP course. Three patterns of interaction emerged, including no visible interaction in which only one individual contributed to a whole text, cooperation in which individuals contributed to wiki writing in a parallel fashion, and collaboration in which group members engaged with each other's ideas in joint construction. More recently, Arnold et al. (2012) detected the pattern of cooperation evidenced by students merely revising their own contribution to wiki writing and the pattern of collaboration evidenced by students taking responsibility over the whole text. Their study yielded the interesting finding that students revised both their own and others' texts in forms, but they tended to merely change their own texts when it came to contents. Dissimilar to the previous two studies in which ‘History’ records were the major source of data, Li and Zhu (2013) drew on the primary data source of wiki ‘Discussion’ and the secondary data source of wiki ‘Page’ and ‘History,’ and captured a picture of ‘the ways in which students negotiated the writing tasks as well as the ways in which students acted upon their negotiated meaning through text construction’ (p. 67). In this study with small groups of EFL college students, the researchers identified three distinct patterns of interaction when small groups jointly produced wiki essays: collectively contributing/mutually supportive, authoritative/responsive and dominant/withdrawn. The first two patterns were found to positively influence students' perceived learning experiences.

Although previous studies explored students' wiki writing process in terms of writing/revising behaviors and interaction dynamics, in either pairs/small groups or a large group (class), a large research gap still remains. Revising behaviors were mostly explored by taking the whole class or the whole group/pair as a unit of analysis (e.g., Kessler and Bikowski, 2010, Kost, 2011), and few studies (Mak and Coniam, 2008) addressed each group member's individual contribution to joint writing. No study to date has delved into how participants collectively discuss collaborative writing tasks and jointly construct the products via wikis. Particularly, no research has investigated how the joint wiki essay is evolved by members' engagements with each other's contribution, construction and revisions in small groups. Such knowledge will yield valuable insights into the process of computer-mediated collaborative writing. Therefore, the present study draws on the construct of ‘collective scaffolding’ (Donato, 1994) and explores a small group's collective scaffolding and mutual engagement within wiki writing tasks in a Chinese EFL tertiary context.

This study seeks answers to the overarching question: How do EFL students collectively discuss and construct small group writing via wikis? This question can be addressed by answering the following two research questions:

  • 1)

    How do a small group of EFL students collectively negotiate writing tasks and meanings via the wiki ‘Discussion’ module?

  • 2)

    How do a small group of EFL students scaffold each other in constructing a joint writing product, as evidenced in the wiki ‘History’ module?

Section snippets

Context and the case

This paper is a follow-up to a previous study on the patterns of wiki-based interaction in small writing groups conducted at a southwestern university in China (Li and Zhu, 2013). The study lasted five weeks, in which students collaboratively worked on three writing tasks,2

Research question 1: how do a small group of EFL students collectively negotiate writing tasks and meanings via the wiki ‘Discussion’ module?

To address this research question, the researcher first discusses some illustrative excerpts showing the group members' reciprocal communication throughout the writing process via wiki ‘Discussion’ and then provides descriptive statistics of each group member's communicating behaviors within three writing tasks.

Data analysis of the ‘Discussion’ records suggested that the three students in this small group were actively engaged with different types of communication, including content discussion,

Discussion

This small group demonstrated a collective approach to wiki-based collaborative writing. The group members showed equal contribution and mutual engagement during the course of wiki-based writing. All the participants actively engaged in writing and scaffolded each other's performance in the collaboration process. Specifically, group members were involved with the discussion of writing tasks and the recursive ways of writing concerning both global and local levels of joint texts.

The finding in

Conclusion

The present study examined how one small group of EFL students collectively performed collaborative writing tasks in the wiki space. The participants used wiki ‘Discussion’ to actively negotiate writing tasks and meanings in multiple aspects, i.e., content discussion, task management, language negotiation, social talk and technical communication. Their writing discussion process was represented by reciprocal feedback, a pooling of linguistic resources and harmonious social interaction. Also,

Acknowledgments

I deeply appreciate Dr. Wei Zhu's guidance on this research, particularly her great help in creating and piloting the coding scheme of text co-construction behaviors in this study. I also feel grateful to Ms. Yao Liu for co-coding the wiki data with me. I am especially indebted to the participants for their time and cooperation. Great thanks also go to the anonymous reviewers, the Editors, and Ms. Julie Dell-Jones for their constructive comments and feedback on earlier versions of this article.

Mimi Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition/ Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida, USA, as well as a College English lecturer at Sichuan Normal University, China. Her research interests include computer-assisted language learning, second language writing, English for academic/specific purposes, and sociocultural theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning, CALL-EJ, IALLT Journal, and Asian ESP Journal.

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    Mimi Li is a Ph.D. candidate in Second Language Acquisition/ Instructional Technology at the University of South Florida, USA, as well as a College English lecturer at Sichuan Normal University, China. Her research interests include computer-assisted language learning, second language writing, English for academic/specific purposes, and sociocultural theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as Computer Assisted Language Learning, CALL-EJ, IALLT Journal, and Asian ESP Journal.

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