Izaskun Villarreal Public University of Navarre
Miren Munarriz-Ibarrola Public University of Navarre
1 Introduction
Many teachers are leveraging the learning opportunities offered by group work in the classroom because group work enables teachers and students to develop and employ knowledge and skills in authentic and meaningful tasks. However, pair and group activities have unevenly been introduced in foreign language (FL) classrooms. While group and pair activities involving oral interactions are common (García Mayo and Lázaro Ibarrola, 2015; García Mayo and Zeitler 2017), collaborative writing activities, understood as the co-authoring and co-ownership of a single text by two or more writers (Storch 2013, 2018), are relatively unusual.
Writing at schools has traditionally been situated within the learning-to-write approach rather than the writing-to-learn a language perspective, in which writing serves as a vehicle for language learning (Manchón 2011). Young learners with emerging language skills have been afforded fewer opportunities to write rather than speak because a certain threshold language proficiency is presupposed below which writing activities might be barren. Besides, young learners’ metalinguistic awareness and ability to metatalk are often underestimated (Muñoz 2017).
Moreover, students and teachers tend to perceive writing tasks negatively. Students conceive writing as a boring and difficult activity and they usually rank it as the most boring language skill to practice (Murtiningsih 2016). Teachers, on the other hand, avoid encouraging writing because they feel overwhelmed with corrections and unsure as to how to give feedback on the written text (McDonough, De Vleeschauwer, and Crawford 2018). However, existing research on students’ beliefs about writing collaboratively has underscored that learners enjoy writing together and consider collaborative writing advantageous for writing and language learning (see Storch 2013 for a summary).
Additionally, research has found that pair work increases engagement and facilitates language learning (Storch 2013). Adult learners have been shown to be able to help peers move towards a more proficient state by providing timely attuned support (De Guerrero and Villamil 2000; Donato 1994; Ohta 1995; Swain 2000, 2006). In fact, recent research has shown that pair and group work improve one or more components of CAF (Complexity, Accuracy and Fluency, e.g., Fernández Dobao, 2012, 2014a; McDonough and García Fuentes 2015; Wigglesworth and Storch 2009) and also some global qualitative measures including content, organization, vocabulary and grammar (Storch 2005; Shehadeh 2011; Villarreal and Gil-Sarratea 2020). The impact that learner setup has on the purported benefits of collaboration, however, is still an underexplored area of research (Fernández Dobao 2012, 2014a).
The limited research that has been carried out has addressed pre-university learners (e.g., Kim and McDonough 2011; Kuiken and Vedder 2002) and mixed findings have been obtained. While in a study with 15–16-year olds completing a dictogloss task benefits were only attested for students whose classroom dynamics already included plenty of pair work (Basterrechea and García Mayo 2013), Bueno-Alastuey and Martínez de Lizarrondo (2017) and Villarreal and Gil-Sarratea (2020) obtained more competent texts from all collaborating students when completing a description task (12–13-year olds) and a composition task (17–18-year olds), respectively.
All in all, writing has been shown to be valuable for learning languages (Manchón, 2011) and pair and group work have been reported to improve written texts on quantitative and qualitative measures (e.g., Fernández Dobao 2012; Villarreal and Gil-Sarratea 2020) and to elicit positive responses from teachers and students alike (Fernández Dobao and Blum 2013; McDonough, De Vleeschauwer, and Crawford 2018). Therefore, situated within the writing to learn language approach (Manchón 2011), the current study seeks to explore the linguistic and motivational effects of writing conditioned by group type. This study adds to the Second Language Acquisition (SLA) literature by exploring the effects of collaboration among young learners, a population which remains underexplored in spite of constituting one of the largest (and fastest growing) groups of English learners in the world (Enever 2018; García Mayo 2017, 2018; Lázaro-Ibarrola and Villarreal 2019).
2 Literature review
The social constructivist perspective of learning (Vygotsky, 1978) establishes that cognitive and linguistic development occur through scaffolded interaction. The use of pair and group work in second language (L2) teaching and learning processes hinges on thi...
