Collaborative activities

The current study investigated the effect of collaborative prewriting activities on learners’ identity construction and L2 writing development. To this end, 43 sophomore upper-intermediate university students majoring in Teaching English as a Foreign Language at an Iranian university who had enrolled in a course called Advanced Writing were randomly divided into two experimental groups (groups A and B) and one control group (group C). While the students in group A were involved in group activities, the students in group B were engaged in pair activities. The students in control group (group C) worked individually. As a pre-test, a pen-and-paper writing task was given to all the students at the beginning of the semester. During the semester, all the participants were exposed to the same materials and were taught by the same teacher for one semester. The only difference was the type of activities in which the participants were engaged. At the end of one semester, a pen-and-paper writing task was given to all the three groups. The findings of the post-test revealed that all the students could significantly improve their writing skills. Nevertheless, the students in group B significantly outperformed their counterparts. Most importantly, the results of identity analysis showed that the students in group A used authorial plural pronouns along with adjectives more frequently. The findings of this study confirmed two issues: first, the significant efficacy of prewriting activities were confirmed at the end of the semester. Second, each type of prewriting activity could affect the learners’ identity construction

The use of task-based collaborative output activities in enhancing EFL students’ writing proficiency has been underrated in the Iranian context. To foster students’ writing ability, the present study, employing a mixed-methods design, aimed to evaluate the effect of innovative tools, dictogloss and debating, on the writing development of English-major university students in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). The study involved two experimental extracurricular classes and consisted of 11 sessions during the regular academic term. Having analyzed the writing tasks produced by the students’ performance on pre-test and post-test, the researcher found that the students of both groups significantly enhanced their writing performance, representing an increase in a number of indices of CAF measures following the intervention. More specifically, the results of a paired-samples t-test confirmed that the students in the dictogloss group showed significant improvement in six indices of CAF measure, and the students in the debate group displayed significant improvement in seven indices of CAF measures. Moreover, the results of ANCOVA confirmed that the debate group improved more than the dictogloss group in terms of CAF measures. The results of the interviews with the students regarding the role of task-based collaborative output activities in their written performance yielded several commonalities, which were coded into 11 codes for dictogloss and 16 codes for debating, taking inter-coder reliability and agreement into account. In the end, the study offers some practical implications for L2 learners and teachers.