Chances and Limitations
3. Teaching writing as a process – Collaborative writing
denounced because they were misguided like the assumption that when learners know and understand what expert writers do, they will be able to use recursive processes on their own (Roen 1989: 199). Hyland, for example, maintains that
‘learning to become an expert writer does not involve mimicking a set of heuristics’
(2002: 61). The model in its original form does not, however, claim that it can reveal how expert writers’ skills have evolved. Trying to teach the underlying skills in any more or less direct way would indeed be doomed to failure (cf. the discussion in section 3). Despite its weaknesses, the writing-as-process approach has its merits in that it provided important insights exploited in the practice of ELT. Among other things it encouraged
self-discovery and authorial ‘voice’; meaningful writing on topics of importance […] to the writer; invention and pre-writing tasks, and multiple drafting […]; a variety of feed- back options from real audiences; […] the idea that writing is multiply recursive rather than linear […]; and students’ awareness of the writing process (Grabe/Kaplan 1996: 87),
so that it forms the basis of many methods used in the teaching of writing. The view taken here is that for the teaching of foreign language other perspectives on writing like the ‘genre’ and the ‘functional approach’ (cf. Gordon 2008: 244ff;
Oxford 2010: 249f) can be seen as an enrichment of process writing rather than a replacement, or, as Gordon puts it, they can be used “in conjunction with the process approach” (2008: 245).
system […] must in some way be reconstructed to function autonomously instead of interactively (Bereiter/Scardamalia 1987: 1).
For this transition it is necessary to provide assistance to the learner, which can, for instance, either take the form of “substantive facilitation”, i.e. specific help given to the learner in the composing process (e.g. teacher feedback on a text), or of “procedural facilitation” (Scardamalia/Bereiter 1986: 796). The latter is of a more unspecific kind, so that it enables students “to carry out more sophisticated composing processes by themselves” (ibid.).
One way of achieving procedural facilitation is by breaking up the highly com- plex process of writing into sub-processes or ‘stages’ like pre-writing, planning, drafting, pausing, reading, revising, editing and publishing (cf. Williams 2003:
106f), so that these can be focussed and worked on in isolation. Wolff (1991:
38 and 1992: 125–131), for instance, suggests activities that are meant to foster content generation, textual planning, audience orientation, critical evaluation of contents and form and revision by means of brainstorming, organizational charts, reading-writing loops, and textual analyses. Most of the available sets of classroom materials for teaching writing are also based on this idea. The volume on Process Writing by White and Arndt, for instance, wants to “nurture the skills with which writers work out their own solutions” (1991: 5) by offering practice activities concentrating on the generation of content, on developing a focus, on structuring the ideas, and on drafting, evaluating and reviewing the text. Brookes and Grundy (1998) also cover the exercises for developing the mechanics of writ- ing and confidence building activities. According to Silva, the teacher’s role in such approaches is to help students develop viable strategies for getting started (finding topics, generating ideas and information, focusing, and planning structure and procedure), for drafting (encouraging multiple drafts), for revising (adding, delet- ing, modifying, and rearranging ideas) and for editing (attending to vocabulary, sentence structure, grammar and mechanics) (1990: 15).
Alternatively, group arrangements have been suggested to achieve the same effect. Williams (2003: 131), for instance, stresses the fact that most writing meant to be read by others is the result of collaborative efforts (even if this collabora- tion is limited to the reading of drafts or final proofreading), so that the writing classroom ought to be transformed into a writing workshop where groups of learners cooperate over a longer period of time: “Groups provide the students with frequent opportunities to interact with one another through writing and talking about their writing” (ibid.: 140), which means that they receive feedback on their work in progress and revise their texts on that basis. For this purpose
Gebhard suggests using writing conferences and peer review sheets with check- lists of possible problems that students can use for their responses (cf. 1996: 242).
Often, however, the cooperation ends when it comes to the composing process itself as students still produce their texts individually. Students are given “ample time”, yet write their texts individually “with […] minimal interference” (Silva 1990: 15). This can also be seen in Hyland’s proposals for developing control of genres, which comprises cooperation in the analysis of genres, in first rehearsals for text production, in which the students and the teacher jointly construct a first model text, and in the revision stage, but not in the construction of the text, which is viewed as an independent student activity (cf. 2003: 21). In contrast to that other researchers and practitioners have suggested group arrangements for the actual writing process and have stressed that here division of labour facilitates the task for each individual because the sub-processes of writing become the shared responsibility of the whole group (cf. Donath 1991: 167; Wolff 1992: 124;
Legenhausen 1996: 86).
Collaborative writing “reduces the complexity of the writing process” (Legen- hausen/Wolff 1990: 327), which is partly due to the fact that some specialization is likely to occur, so that the individual students take on different roles like that of a keyboard operator, grammarian, speller, technician, etc. (cf. Groundwater- Smith 1993: 18). Typically one student will take over the role of the scribe or secretary, who is in charge of the mechanics of writing and records the text. As a result the other group members can “concentrate on the language, think about what is being written, and evaluate it in a more objective way […] than they judge their own individual efforts.” (Harmer 2004: 77). Especially if the group uses re- sources such as dictionaries, more such specialization is likely to occur; so some students might focus primarily on the linguistic accuracy and appropriacy of the text produced, while other students’ main responsibility would be the generation of content for the text.
As process-oriented research (e.g. Dam/Legenhausen/Wolff 1990; Legen- hausen/Wolff 1991; Legenhausen 1996; Zeni 1994) has convincingly shown, text production in small groups is extremely beneficial to learners. The collaboration forces the learners to verbalize their ideas, which are subsequently evaluated by their peers, so that instant feedback is provided (cf. Legenhausen 1996: 87). What’s more, any such contribution may trigger counter-proposals that are further nego- tiated by the group, so that the learners must support them by arguments and thus lay open their own evaluation criteria (cf. Dam/Legenhausen/Wolff 1990: 327).
Similarly, they have to activate and explicate their text-linguistic knowledge when it comes to assessing the text’s coherence, the appropriacy of phrases or more
general questions of style and the text’s overall organization. In very much the same way the collaborative planning of the text makes it necessary for the learners to explicitly state their plans (cf. Legenhausen/Wolff 1991: 350). What normally happens within the individual writer’s mind therefore becomes subject of a ne- gotiation process. Discussion and decision-making raises the awareness of both evaluation criteria and planning strategies and makes them more available to the learners. In other words, what happens in such groups is constant peer reviewing, which is extremely helpful to them because it indirectly also develops their ability to edit and revise their own texts when writing individually. According to Bonk and King, research indicates that learners “internalize the scaffolding of more capable peers when writing collaboratively” (1995: 22).
Another side effect of the conversational work learners often transfer means for structuring their written discourse from their oral interaction. When content is being discussed, the learners will often adapt a speech-into-writing approach.
During the discussion they use discourse-structuring devices to secure compre- hension by their peers, which will then be adapted to the written medium, thus also enhancing comprehension on the part of potential readers. Quite naturally they will reflect on their audience because the group members act as “ ‘test-readers’
for the developing text” (Dam/Legenhausen/Wolff 1990: 329). This need for taking the reader into account is something that inexperienced L2 writers normally face great difficulties with (cf. Brookes/Grundy 1990: 19).
Finally, the threat-to-face is reduced for the individual learner. Especially in a classroom context, writing is perceived as a very ‘risky’ activity by many learners because of the permanence of the final product, its relationship to the identity of the writer and the role it plays in assessment. Writing texts in groups lets learners share responsibility for the product (cf. Harmer 2004: 73), so that such tasks are less threatening; collaborative writing thus “lowers the anxiety associated with completing tasks alone and raise students’ self-confidence” (Mulligan/Garofaro 2011: 5).
Most importantly, however, such collaborative writing triggers social processes between learners that make them work “in their ‘zone of proximal development’
[…], reaching beyond the level they could reach on their own” (Zeni 1994: 224).
In other words, by collaborating inexperienced writers can in fact develop more sophisticated writing skills (Mulligan/Garofaro 2011: 9), so that they do not necessarily need individual feedback from instructors or tutors to push forward their boundaries. Therefore, collaboration is, perhaps, the most natural route to individual competence in writing (ibid.: 216). Moreover, learners’ general language competence also improves through the active participation in the text
construction process as verbalizing learning and writing strategies plays a crucial role in the construction of new linguistic knowledge (Swain 2000: 109 and 113).
Similar effects can be expected with regard to their world knowledge and their social skills (Keller 2013: 244f).1