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SYNCHRONOUS COMPUTER-MEDIATED
COLLABORATIVE WRITING IN THE ESL CLASSROOM

presented by
ALLYSSA BLYTHE CHAMBERLAIN

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MA. degree in Teaching English to Speakers
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SYNCHRONOUS COMPUTER-MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE WRITING IN THE
ESL CLASSROOM

By

Allyssa Blythe Chamberlain

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

MASTER OF ARTS
Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages

2010

ABSTRACT

SYNCHRONOUS COMPUTER-MEDIATED COLLABORATIVE WRITING IN THE
ESL CLASSROOM

By

Allyssa Blythe Chamberlain
This research explores the transferability of the intemet communication tool (ICT),
Googledocs, as a computer supported collaborative learning tool (CSCL) in the ESL
classroom. That is, whether the use of this authentic tool—one created specifically for
the purpose of facilitating collaboration among real people in real life contexts—when
employed as a writing tool in the language classroom, suggests any advantages for
learners. This exploratory study describes the nature of student interaction during the
writing process in both environments and compares end results for those environments in
question: face-to-face and computer-mediated. Informed by current SLA theory, the
current project’s descriptive analysis aims at a more concrete conceptualization of what
implications for language learning and development Googledocs may have for learners.
Also discussed are the pedagogical limitations for and suggested considerations of

employing this tool in the language classroom.

COPYRIGHT BY
ALLYSSA BLYTHE CHAMBERLAIN
2010

Dedicated to my partner in crime, CMC.

iv

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Sometimes you have you watch somebody love something before you can love it yourself
It is as if they are showing you the way. ~Donald Miller

Two and a half years ago, I embarked on a journey to graduate school. My
expectations of what the years ahead of me would hold included little beyond the
theoretical and pedagogical foundation requisite of teaching English to language learners.
What I found, however, was a community of mentors and colleagues that did more than
teach—they showed me how to love many aspects of the field of Second Language
Acquisition. It is towards those individuals—the ones who have traveled with me on this
exciting, engaging, and humbling adventure—that I must express my gratitude. While it
would be impossible to express how much your presence in my life has meant over the
past semesters, 1 would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you. Without your
guidance, I would not be where I am today.

First, it is with utmost respect, admiration, and appreciation that I would like to
thank my readers. I am grateful to Dr. Senta Goertler for her personal and professional
guidance. Without her course in Computer-Assisted Language Learning last spring, I
might never have had the opportunity to witness the love and enthusiasm she exudes for
the wonderful world of technology! And, without that, I would never have stumbled
upon my own love for it. I am lucky to have had the opportunity to work with such an
encouraging and inspiring mentor. For the constant support, the countless Tuesday
morning meetings and email exchanges, I will be forever grateful. I also owe

considerable thanks to Dr. Charlene Polio whose expertise and guidance have been

instrumental in my academic career. From our first meeting to discuss an article
presentation assignment in LLT 895 to our last thesis meeting, Dr. Polio’s insight and
thoughtful feedback have been constant sources of inspiration to delve into the field.

A thanks also goes out to all members of the Department of Linguistics and
Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and Afi'ican Languages and the English Language Center at
Michigan State University including all professors, fellow graduate students, and ELC
colleagues. I am grateful for the moral, academic, and professional support and
encouragement you have offered over these four semesters. I especially want to thank
my level 4 writing students for their patience and willingness to experiment with new
technologies. Ms. Amy Kroesche for her enthusiasm in literature was so convincing that
I soon found myself teaching it as well. I also need to thank Ms. Kroesche for her help
rating. You are one heck of a reliable interrater!

Finally, I must thank all of my family and friends for their unconditional support,
love, and patience. Thank you for listening to my wild ramblings about synchronous
computer-this and collaborative-writing that. Your kind, tuned ears have helped me to
better grasp the literature and my data while still hanging on to my sanity! A special
thanks to my father, and brother who have wrapped me in their love, encouragement, and
sympathy semester after semester. To Jen, Dale, and Erik, you three have given me a
calm respite from all this craziness--a space in which I could just be. I thank you more
than I can say for that. Most of all, I wish to thank my partner in crime who has
graciously accompanied me through this exhilarating, yet grueling journey. I feel truly
blessed to have all of you in my life and to have had the opportunity to watch all of you

love your "somethings".

vi

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES .............................................................................. viii
LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................... ix
LIST OF SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS ............................................. x
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................. 1
A Brief History of Technology and Language Learning ............................. 2
The Future of Technology and Language Learning .................................. 6
CHAPTER TWO
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE REVIEW ........................ 9
Theoretical Framework .................................................................. 9
Advantages of Collaborative Learning: Two Perspectives” ..9
The Present View ............................................................... 13
Literature Review ............................................................... 14
Innovative Ways to Teach Writing with Technology: Past and Current 24
CMC and Collaborative Writing .............................................. 26
Collaborative writing, CMC, and SLA ....................................... 31
Collaboration and Beyond ..................................................... 33
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY ............................................................................... 35
Research Questions ...................................................................... 35
Participants ................................................................................ 36
Case Study Participants .......................................................... 36
Procedures .................................................................................. 37
Class Description, Context, and Writing Environment ..................... 39
Pilot Study ........................................................................ 40
Training Session ................................................................. 41
Writing Task ..................................................................... 42
Post-Task ......................................................................... 43
Data Analysis ............................................................................. 44
Googledocs Revision History .................................................. 44
CHAPTER FOUR
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS ................................................................... 53
Results: Surveys ........................................................................... 53
Perception of Collaboration .................................................... 53
Response to Environment ........................................................ 57
Case-Studies ............................................................................... 59

vii

Participant EU ................................................................... 59

Participant MC .................................................................. 69
Environment: CMC versus F2F ............................................... 78
Summary ................................................................................................. 81
CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS, & FUTURE RESEARCH ............................ 83
Transferability of Googledocs as a CSCL ............................................. 83
CMC Googledocs: A Truly Collaborative Tool? ............................ 83
Pedagogical Implications of Googledocs ...... ‘ ....................................... 92
Summary and Future Research ......................................................... 96
Limitations ................................................................................. 97
APPENDICES ...................................................................................... 99
REFERENCES ................................................................................... 115

viii

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1 Googledocs Versus Wikis ............................................................... 29
Table 2 Original Plan for Counterbalanced Tasks ............................................ 38
Table 3 Actual Task Breakdown .................................................................. 38
Table 4 Starch (2005) Adapted Coding Scheme ............................................... 50
Table 5 Research Questions, Data, and Analysis .............................................. 52
Table 6 Comparison of Means Survey Responses by Environment ......................... 55
Table 7 EU Distribution of Student Talk Content ............................................. 62
Table 8 Peer Revision & Edits EU CMC Essay 1 ............................................. 65
Table 9 EU Holistic Essay Scores by Environment ............................................ 69
Table 10 MC Distribution of Student Talk Content .......................................... 72
Table 11 Peer Revision & Edits MC CMC ...................................................................... 76
Table 12 Peer Revision & Edits MC CMC ...................................................................... 76
Table 13 MC Holistic Essay Scores by Environment ...................................................... 77
Table 14 Total Means of Student Talk by Environment ................................................... 79
Table 15 Holistic Ratings and Percent Rater Agreement ................................................ 80
Table 16 Mean Holistic Scores by Environment .............................................................. 81

ix

LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1. A Screenshot of Googledocs ............................................................................ 44
Figure 2. A Screenshot of a Second Person Editing the Googledocs .............................. 45
Figure 3. Googledocs “Revision History” Screen Shot ................................................... 46
Figure 4. Screenshot of Googledocs “Compare” Revisions Page ................................... 47

KEY TO SYMBOLS AND ABBREVIATIONS

Abbreviation Key
CMC Computer-mediated communication
CSCL Computer supported collaborative learning tool
F2F Face-to-face
ICT Internet communication tool

SLA Second language acquisition

xi

Our premise, therefore, is that, in considering the future of computer-assisted
language learning (CALL), we should continue to leverage educationally
oriented, computer—mediated activity, while also remaining aware of the

transformational roles many of these collaborative tools play in meaningful
language use, both inside and outside of the classroom. A corollary is that, in
some cases, mastery of high-frequency and high-stakes mediated genres of
communication should also form the explicit goal of educational practice.
(Sykes, Oszko, & Theme, 2008, p. 529)

CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION

The integration of technology into the language classroom has become a topic of
interest to many second language acquisition researchers, language educators, higher
education administrators, and stakeholders. Recent developments in computer and
internet technologies are lighting the way for potential shifis in the nature of the language
learning classroom. Although each aforementioned party may look to the
implementation of technology in the classroom for different reasons, all share the interest
in gaining a better understanding of technology and the implications it may hold for the
future of language learning.

The recent birth of Web 2.0 tools, or tools that make it possible to link people not
just information, and their increasing popularity as a legitimate means of communication
and social interaction in the real world have contributed to a secondary development in
the communicative language classroom: the use of these same authentic media as forum
not only for language learning but also as authentic arenas of communication and
collaborative work (Sykes, Oszko, & Thorne, 2008, p. 528). The L2 composition course,
in particular, has felt the effects of this revolution with the integration of blogs and wikis
into course writing assignments. Clearly, numerous other tools exist on today's intemet,

all of which have received various levels of interest in the world of education and

language research. Despite rigorous research into the application of many of these
technologies, many remain understudied. One such emerging tool, Googledocs, has yet
to be examined as a potential venue for collaborative learning in the L2 writing
classroom. Googledocs is a collection of Microsoft Office-like online services that
allows users to share work online. The current research seeks to explore Googledocs in
order to better understand its implications as both a learning tool and an authentic
medium of communication in the L2 writing classroom.
A Brief History of Technology and Language Learning

Technology is certainly a broad term that has encompassed a variety of
pedagogical materials and tools over its long history of use in the language classroom--
from studies on the audio input of phonographs and radio in the early 19003 to an
extension to the visual input provided by television, film, and videos in the mid-19605 to
the possibilities of the computer, intemet, and computer-mediated communication (CMC)
of today (Salaberry, 2001 ). Early research with computers ofien focused on word
processing and its implications on the drafting, revision, and editing during the writing
process (Siegler, et. a1, 1995; O'Hara, 1996 as referenced in Hayes, 1996) as well as on
length of the composed essay (1220, 1996; Lam & Pennington, 1995; Mehdi, 1994; Silver
& Repa, 1993) and overall quality of the essay produced (J iang, 2001; Lam &
Pennington, 1995; Smith, 1993). More recently, research has explored the possibilities
for language learning made possible through the intemet (e.g., Web 1.0 and Web 2.0).
The intemet has made readily accessible an extensive bank of authentic media

(considered vital by Krashen, 1985) to both teachers and students alike (Arnold, 2007).

According to Blake (2001) such authentic media, "can play a major role in enhancing L2
leamers' contact with the target language, especially in the absence of study abroad".
Beyond increased access to authentic language, SLA interactionist researchers
have found intemet technologies to proffer many other theoretically sound benefits for
language learners. Synchronous and/or asynchronous collaborative tasks (e.g., essays
written over emails, online text-chat programs, wikis, or Googledocs) provide learners
with the output practice thought pivotal to language development by Swain (2001).
When attempting to describe the interactions experienced by students engaging in CMC
tasks, researchers have noted that the technology has effected greater student
participation (Beauvois, 1992; Chun, 1994; Kelm, 1992; Kern, 1995; Warschauer, 1996),
equalization of student involvement (Beauvois, 1992; Kern, 1995; Warschauer, 1996),
greater learner autonomy and shift in authority (Beauvois, 1992; Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995;
Warschauer, Turbee & Roberts, 1996; Wildner-Bassett, 2008), and reduced learner
anxiety (Chun, 1994; Kern, 1995). Such collaborative interactions have also led to
greater complexity in structures produced (Warschauer, 1996) and improved oral
proficiency after online chatting (Beauvois, 1998; Kern, 1995; Warschauer, 1996).
Although all-of-the-above are certainly benefits from an interactionist
perspective, perhaps the most poignant effect of CMC is that of reduced learner
inhibitions. As Sanders (2005) has written, "When used in a supportive class
atmosphere, the reduced inhibition fostered by CMC should result in greater risk taking,
confidence, and collaboration" (p. 524). That is, reduced anxiety results in the tendency
to create learner-support networks (Darhower, 2002; Feenberg, 1999; Kern, 1995) where

collaboration may ensue.

Learners are not the only one who benefit from the movement towards CMC in
the classroom. CMC offers the possibility of recording student production and
interaction during tasks such that collaborative efforts might be evaluated more fairly.
The ease of this media means that teachers can regularly assign and evaluate
collaborative work while still giving meaningful and individualized feedback to learners.
According to Lyddon and Sydorenko (2008), CMC opens the door for a "veritable
paradigm shift" that will make continuous assessment feasible, serving to "encourage
further growth" in learners (p. 199-201). In this sense, technology permits class time to
be reserved for communicative activities which might engage all learners; and, out of
class it creates a forum where students might receive added linguistic input and
productive output practice, both of which stimulate and sustain learner interest.

Both what is experienced by learners during computer-mediated communication
and collaboration and what is experienced by teachers as a result of computer-mediated
communication pair nicely with what is known of learning in general and language
acquisition specifically. John Dewey, an American philosopher and educator, believed
that, "learners do not learn in isolation; the individual learns by being part of the
surrounding community and the world as a whole" (Oxford, 1997, p. 447). Dewey,
perhaps the first constructivist, "proposed a triangular relationship for the social
construction of ideas among the individual, the community, and the world" (Oxford,
1997, p. 447). Another credited with fathering current theories that have influenced
language learning is Vygotsky. Oxford (1997) writes of Vygotsky

Like Dewey, Vygotsky recognized that ideas have social origins; they are

constructed through communication with others. An individual's cognitive system

is a result of communication in social groups and cannot be separated from social
life (V ygotsky, 1978; 1986). Vygotsky (with Dewey) focused on the individual
powerfully rooted in the group context (Donate, 1994; John-Steiner, 1985;
Lantolf, 1993). For Vygotsky, the teacher acts as a facilitator or guide and the

provider of assistance. (p. 448)

Taking into account the work of Dewey and Vygotsky, it would seem only natural for
SLA researchers to promote pedagogical practices that shift the responsibility of learning
from the teacher to the student. This shift in mentality fiom "a sage on the stage" to a

" guide on the side" (Fitch as cited in Belz, 2003, p. 117) would ideally be facilitated by

tools that allow for authentic communication and social interaction.

Enter Web 2.0. Web 2.0, a term coined by O'Reilly (2005), refers to changes in
the way that people are using web applications to communicate (Warschauer & Grimes,
2007, p. 2). Users are moving beyond the use of the web as simply a transmission of
information--a linking of information in Web 1.0--t0 a co-creation of information--a
linking of people--in Web 2.0 (Wesch, 2007). Whereas Web 1.0 applications include
email, chat rooms, discussion boards, and instant messaging, Web 2.0 includes the social
networking and collaborative projects found in blogs, YouTube, and wikis (Kraemer,
2008). Web 2.0 tools, by nature, "support collaborative and individual text and
multimedia production" in addition to focusing students' attention on language and its use
including morphosyntactic structures, lexical choices, rhetorical style, cohesion, and
unity and doing all of these in a media "rooted in, often pluralistic, linguistic and cultural

conventions" (Sykes, Oskoz, & Thome, 2008, p. 530).

The wiki is a Web 2.0 tool whose use has recently entered the language classroom
and, as a result, has fueled research into the possibility for and realization of language
learning. Not only has the use of CMC technologies proven sound pedagogical practice
in the promotion of continued language development, but they have also opened doors to
a revolution in the way languages will be taught. Many studies have noted similar
learning outcomes of face-to-face, traditional classrooms to online interactive and/or
distance-learning education. As language programs and universities face increasing
financial challenges, the desirability of reduced costs also increases. Administrators and
stakeholders as well as language departments under fiscal constraints want to know the
implications of moving some, or all of classroom seat time outside of the classroom's
walls (i.e., of employing, in some combination, the use of technology to reduce costs).

The Future of Technology and Language Learning

Though tentative, the latest generation of distance education "has the potential to
decrease significantly the cost of online tuition and thereby increase significantly access
to education and training opportunities on a global scale" (Kraemer, 2008, p.21).
Research into distance education and the integration of technology as a means to decrease
institutional cost has provided mixed results on what the future of education holds for
language learners. Several studies have noted that university language departments
struggling to meet the demands of increased enrollment concurrent with teacher shortages
and budget cuts have become increasingly more interested in technology-enhanced and/or
hybrid courses (Blake, 2001; Goertler & Winke, 2008; Sanders, 2005). In a review of a
Portland State University Spanish course redesigned to include a CMC component

Sanders (2005) reported that the lowered costs, class size, and seat-time, made it possible

for increased enrollment and potential for an even greater increase in enrollment.
Alongside these benefits, Sanders reported that the CMC courses maintained student
achievement outcomes, but that proficiency, especially writing proficiency worsened.
Sanders' (2005) research presents both the promise for new possibilities as well as
potential issues for language departments. With that said, it becomes incumbent upon
educators to examine the implementation of technology thoroughly so that we might have
a firm grasp on its impact on our learners and their language acquisition.

Second language acquisition researchers have already begun this arduous task, yet
as technology is ever-changing, there is much yet to be explored. Recent research
specifically pertaining to the use of technology as a tool to facilitate writing in the
language classroom has included the integration of blogs, wikis, and instant messaging.

Despite the growing body of research in the nature of CMC and its pedagogical
implications, one tool that has to date received little attention is Googledocs. Googledocs
is a collection of online services that allows users to "create and share [their] work
online" (Google, 2010). Because Googledocs store the document on the intemet, they
are well-suited to a collaborative task because they can function in a synchronous
fashion. Googledocs are being used increasingly in both the realm of business and
education (Google, 2010).

Sykes, Oszko, and Theme (2008) have claimed that the future of technology in
the classroom rests in the language practitioner's ability to exploit, from an informed
stance, the nature of computer mediated activity for educational purposes. Furthermore,
tools that not only promote language acquisition, but that also present real-life

applications should receive the brunt of the attention. Googledocs is one such tool about

which we as language practitioners have only speculative information. The current study
seeks to gain insight into this tool, that by investigating the collaborative writing and
revision processes of students using it, language practitioners might come to more fully
grasp how this environment might prove a useful language learning tool. This research
also attempts to explore how the nature of this particular environment may shape the
writing process while maintaining a critical eye so as to avoid technological determinism
(Goertler & Winke, 2008). Thus, this the impetus driving the current research project is
whether or not students collaborating with this new technology use it in such a way that a

case could be made for it as a meaningful language learning tool?

CHAPTER TWO
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK AND LITERATURE REVIEW

This chapter deals primarily with introducing the theoretical framework on which
the current study is based as well as presenting a review of the literature. The literature
review begins with a brief overview of what writing theories tell us about the writing
process followed by a discussion of what is known about the writing process in one's L2.
After a basic understanding of the writing process has been established, the review turns
to research specific to the present study. That is, it reviews research done in writing: with
word processors, with peer collaboration, and with Web 2.0 tools. The chapter concludes
with an attempt to compare previously researched intemet tools (e.g. instant messaging
and wikis) with the tool used in the current study, Googledocs, in order to make some
predictions about how this tool might function in the language classroom as a computer
supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tool.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
Advantages of Collaborative Learning: Two Perspectives

The practice of collaborative learning in the communicative language classroom
is supported by a robust body of SLA research spanning several prominent theoretical
frameworks. Each branch, of course, offers its explanations for and own implications of
the advantages of collaborative writing. The main vein discussed herein is
interactionism, which has a cognitive and a sociocultural branching (e.g., Mackey &
Polio, 2009). Interactionists, believing that language learning requires the transmission
of knowledge, stand behind the increased opportunity for output and practice (Swain,
2001) because of its ftmction to raise awareness and noticing (Gass, 1997) or because of

beliefs that learning is inherently social and thus collaboration naturally pairs here

because it alone provides the opportunity for knowledge construction. Regardless of
which branch is chosen, a common conclusion clearly emerges--collaboration should
benefit learners. I have briefly outlined the major arguments for collaboration from these
two perspectives: interactionist and constructivist.

The Interactionist View

Like any branch of SLA, interactionist research and thought extends well beyond
the brief review presented here; this is not meant as a comprehensive overview but rather
as one that highlights the major tenets of interactionism and the research that is most
relevant to the current study. See Mackey and Polio (2009) for one interpretation of the
interactionist paradigm.

Perhaps most relevant to the current discussion of interactionism and
collaboration is Swain's research (1998; 2000; 2001). Her research was born of an
attempt to decipher why intermediate learners of French in a rigorous immersion program
had failed to reach native-like proficiency, noted that students 1.) spoke infrequently and
2.) rarely spoke more than a few words (Swain, 2001). From these observations came the
Output Hypothesis (Swain, 1998; Swain, 2000; Swain & Lapkin, 2002) was a reaction to
Krashen's Input Hypothesis (1985). Swain claimed that native-like proficiency could not
be achieved through input alone (as Krashen claimed); she advanced three primary
processes that occur when learners are prompted to interact: noticing the gap, hypothesis
testing, and metalinguistic reflection. She noted that such interactions enabled students to
monitor their language and by so doing reach higher proficiency levels.

The (Social) Constructivist View

10

The idea of social learning originated in Vygotsky's (1978) seminal work on child
first language acquisition. Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory (SCT) holds as its basic tenet
the idea that the function of communication is not just to transmit information but also to
collaboratively construct new knowledge (Williams, 2005, p. 6). It is through this
collaboration that cognitive development is achieved. Vygotsky outlined two paths
through which knowledge can be co-constructed: 1.) mediated processes and 2.) activity
theory. Lantolf, credited with introducing Vygotskian thought to the realm of SLA, noted
three components that constitute mediated processes: 1.) social mediation 2.) self-
mediation, and 3.) artifact mediation (Lantolf, 2002).

Social mediation, which is relevant to the current research, deals primarily with
the scaffolding that occurs within the zone of proximal development (ZPD). Vygotsky
defined the ZPD as “the site where future development is negotiated by the expert and the
novice and where assistance is offered, appropriated, refused, and withheld" (as
referenced in Lantolf, 2002, p. 105). That is, experts helps novices by mediating (or
scaffolding) a task such that the novices are enabled to perform at higher levels than they
could have achieved on their own. In his research, Vygotsky noted that the role of the
expert was primarily filled by adults or teachers.

SLA research has investigated Vygotsky's claims in relation to the language
learner. Research on social mediation in the language classroom indicates that an expert
need not be an adult; in fact, instances of scaffolding can (and frequently do) operate
beneficially within student peer groups (Donato, 1994; Storch, 2002 as referenced in
Storch, 2005). Storch (2005) has furthered,

Thus, from a social constructivist perspective, learners should be encouraged to

11

participate in activities which foster interaction and co-construction of knowledge.

From a pedagogical perspective, the use of small group and pair work is further

supported by the communicative approach to L2 instruction and its emphasis on

providing learners with opportunities to use the L2. (p. 154)

Research into collaborative peer-pairs from a sociocognitive perspective would
look at whether and how knowledge is co-constructed. It would also look for the
presence of scaffolding.

To the basic tenet of the "dialogic and inherently social process of knowledge
building,” constructivist research references work in cognitive science which cites
additional cognitive benefits of collaborative learning. Dale (1994) claimed that viewing
another person's cognitive processes unfold was helpful in ftu'thering students' own
cognitive abilities. In other words, collaboration offers students the rare instance where
they might gain insight into the mental processes of their peers. Perhaps by witnessing
the processes through which other students approach writing, students might be
encouraged to experiment with these new techniques—techniques that they would have
otherwise been unfamiliar with or unaware of. The collaboration, then, can serve a
demonstrative or training purpose.

Adding to Vygotsky's work is that of Hall (1997). Hall (1997) claimed that since
meaning is co-constructed, it must also be viewed holistically. That is,

what learners ultimately learn in the target language and how they learn to do it

are tied to the quality and quantity of opportunities they are given to develop

competence in using the resources of the practices that are made available to

them. Thus any understanding of the development of the individual learner, of the

12

mechanisms by which he or she comprehends and produces the target language,

and of the norms by which his or her language use is to be evaluated can only

come from a historical accounting of the context, the symbolic resources used,

and the involvement of the other participants in the actual learning process. (Hall,

1997,p.303)
Hall's conclusion clearly highlights the importance of understanding how context
influences the learning process. By extension, exploring the nature of interaction in new
learning environments seems necessary to gaining an understanding of an environment's
potential for learning.

The Present View

In their book, Multiple Perspectives on Interaction: Second Language Research
in Honor of Susan M. Gass, Mackey and Polio (2009) have written,

In general, her [Gass'] perspective has been that SLA in fact must be

interdisciplinary in order to progress as a field, and she has repeatedly made a

point of out lining ways in which different research areas can be intergrated

through a sharing of insights among theoretical, applied, psycho-, socio, and

neuro-linguists, and, of course, language teachers and language professionals

(Gass, 1988, 1993, 1995, 2004 as referenced in Mackey & Polio, 2009, p. 4).
The current research attempts to tap into this same interdisciplinary vein Gass has
repeatedly proposed. It seeks to determine what can be said of the benefits of using an
intemet communication tool (ICT), specifically Googledocs, as an emerging computer
supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tool in the second language classroom (Arnold,

Ducate, Lomick, & Lord, 2009). That is, it examines the transferability of a real-life tool,

13

 

one created specifically for the purpose of facilitating collaboration among real people in
real life contexts, to the classroom. The notion of transferability here is operationalized
as whether any of the theoretical advantages of collaboration reviewed above (from
interactionist, constructionist, and cognitive perspectives) are visible when students
collaborate with the ICT, Googledocs. Such transferability would naturally need to
address whether or not students are collaborating, how much they are collaborating, and
what is the nature of this collaboration.

If the Googledocs ICT is to be a successful CSCL, one would need to demonstrate
that some or all of the processes reviewed above are at work during a learner's use of the
tool. That is, that a study of student collaboration in a Googledocs environment is
congruent with Swain's Output Hypothesis (noticing the gap, hypothesis testing, and
metalinguistic reflection), Sociocultural Theory's scaffolding, and/or cognitive science's
opportunities to witness the process (Dale, 1994). The current research seeks to offer a
comprehensive look at how ESL learners act and interact in the Googledocs learning
environment as they attempt to create meaning during a collaborative writing task.

Literature Review
The L1 Writing Process

Previous to the second language acquisition field's adoption of social-
constructivism, the notions of Vygotsky had been integrated into L1 writing axiologies.
Along with expressivism and procedural rhetoric, it has remained one of the prevalent
"theories of value" in the field of L1 composition (Fulkerson, 2005, p. 655). Regardless
of which guiding theory one ascribes to, the question of how a particular text comes into

being, remains a critical topic of interest (Fulkerson, 2005). To this end, composition

14

 

research since the 19805 has attempted to conceptualize what internal (mental) and
external (environmental) factors influence the birth and development of a piece of
writing. It is through an understanding of these "pieces" of the writing puzzle that
researchers might begin to make observations on, draw conclusions about, and make
predictions for the writing process.

Starting in the early part of the 19803, researchers in L1 composition assumed the
task of creating a theory of writing, a task that spanned nearly two decades in coming to
fruition (Grabe, 2001). Early models, though certainly proffering some differences, were
largely grounded in cognitive psychology and, as a result, focused on the mental
processes within the individual (e.g., Flower-Hayes, 1980, 1981; Graves, 1984; Bereiter
& Scardamalia, 1987). Perhaps as a result of the theoretical and pedagogical stronghold
that social-constructivism took in education, later models emerged that began to account
for the presence of the individual and the social context (e. g., Flower, 1994; Hayes,
1996). That is, the models lent greater attention to how the environment interacted with
an individual's mental processes in order to shape the writing context and individual's
movements within it. Along with these changes came the realization that motivational
and affective factors were at work within the individual and thus needed to be accounted
for (Hayes, 1996; Kellogg, 1994; 1996 as referenced in Grabe, 2001).

In 1996, Hayes expanded the earlier Hayes-Flower writing model to do just that:
he accounted for the role of the task environment and the individual. The former
"consists of a social component, which includes the audience, the social environment, and
other texts that the writer may read while writing," while the latter is "a physical

component, which includes the text that the writer has produced so far and a writing

15

medium such as a word processor" (Hayes, 1996, p.4). The new model also recognized
the influence of "motivation and affect, cognitive processes, working memory, and long-
term memory" (p. 4). The model identified the major processes and their minor
subprocesses that are at work when a student is in the process of composing a piece of
text. See Hayes (1996) for a more in-depth look at the revised model.

The bidirectional arrows in the Hayes (1996) diagram account for the
interdependence and long-standing notion of the recursivity (as opposed to linearality) of
the writing process. Smith (1984) has defined recursion as a process that is

constantly spiraling back from later to earlier writing, shuttling between a

complex, abstract context and one that is simpler, more concrete, replaying a

familiar tune in a new key or with new instruments. . . . Repetition, variation, and

sequence can foster exploration and development of ideas, just as they do in

music. (p. 460)

Recursion in writing occurs both online (as the author writes and returns to previously
written work, i.e., rereading a section to revise or spur on new ideas) and/or during
writing tasks involving multiple-sessions (where drafts are planned, written, revisited,
and revised).

The revised model also accounts for the social nature of writing. That is, the idea
that writing functions as a form of communication. Inherent in such communication is a
social context and a medium, both of which impact a particular writing (Hayes, 1996).
While writing theorists--past and present--have had varying degrees of success in
identifying the critical constituents and their interaction within the writing "puzzle," they

have failed to move beyond their theoretical outlines to meaningful descriptions. The

16

 

task of applying theories to describe the interaction among particular individuals,
contexts, and medium has been left to others. The present research attempts to fill part of
this hole: to describe how second language learners of English interact during
collaborative writing tasks with a new online tool, Googledocs. This research seeks to
describe how the capabilities of the medium might affect the writing processes that occur.
Understanding the L2 Writing Process

Early on, L2 writing research shadowed L1 writing theories and its trend toward
cognitive psychology (Grabe, 2001). With time, L2 writing scholarship diverged because
researchers came to recognize the unique demands on an L2 writer of English such as
adapting to different writing values which call for originality, creativity, and critical
thinking (Atkinson & Ramanathan, 1995); adjusting to writing tasks that demand
response to and explication of texts (Leki & Carson, 1993; 1997); and managing the
influence of the L1 on the organization and structure of written arguments (Connor, 1996;
Leki, 1997). The studies mentioned here are among many that attempt to describe the
differences between L1 and L2 writing; this body of research does not set out to create a
writing theory, rather it describes the invisible influences on an L2 writer with the goal of
informing writing instruction.

Although L2 writing researchers have thus far not authored theories specific to the
L2 writing construct, Grabe (2001) has pointed out that the "environment" factor in
Hayes' (1996) model does allow for all of the aforementioned demands on an L2 writer.
Where the application of Hayes' (1996) model fails in the L2 context, is the fact that it
"makes no effort to account for growing language proficiencies" which are seen as

fundamental to describing writing development of a language learner (as quoted in

17

 

Grabe, 2001, p. 47). A second model by Grabe and Kaplan (1996) arose from applied
linguistics and, as such, made strides towards including a language variable while still
incorporating the role that the task environment/context and the individual play in
cognition (as referenced in Grabe, 2001).

The call to integrate the developing interlanguage into research on L2 writing has
been well-taken. The present study seeks not only to describe how the context and
medium affect the writing process during online collaborative writing, but also to account
for whether writing in this setting may present a potential for language development.
That is, could the authentic use of Googledocs in the ESL classroom prove to be a
productive computer supported collaborative language learning tool?

L2 Writing with Computers

As previously mentioned, current writing models note the effect that a writing
medium has on the mental processes involved in writing and the products produced as a
result of those mental processes (e.g., Hayes, 1996). Different task environments put
different demands on learners. For example, writing with a computer requires the learner
be literate in the use of word processing programs as well as familiar with the keyboard;
learners underconfident or unschooled in these computer literacies may find their writing
suffer under the costs of using a computer environment. The opposite is also true:
computer-literate learners might find the computer to be facilitative of their composing
and revision process. The task environment is thus seen to influence the way in which
the learners approach and carry out the writing task (O'Hara, 1996 as referenced in
Hayes, 1996). "Designers of word processing systems and other writing media should

understand that system characteristics can have significant impact on writing processes"

18

(Hayes, 1996, p.11). Hayes (1996) hints at the necessity of understanding and accurately
describing a "system", a point to which we will return to later.

Research on writing with computers has attempted to understand just how much
the computer may influence the writing process with comparative studies. These studies
sought to determine whether the new medium better facilitated the writing process than
its predecessor, the pen and paper. These results have been mixed with some research
noting the supposed disadvantages of using computers such as shorter texts (Izzo, 1996);
lower quality final products (Smith, 1993); poor organization (Izzo, 1996); inefficiencies
of training/use (Izzo, 1996); and difficulties of visualizing formatting (Izzo, 1996) and
other research claiming quite the opposite: longer texts (Mehdi, 1994); similar (Izzo,
1996; Lam & Pennington, 1995) and/or higher (Silver & Repa, 1993) quality texts
produced. The literature has also suggested that analytic scores for content (Jiang, 2001)
as well as vocabulary, language use, and mechanics (Lam & Pennington, 1995) have
been higher when texts were written on computers. Computers may result in positive
learner attitudes (Mehdi, 1994) or may have no significant affect on improving learner
self-esteem (Silver & Repa, 1993).

Further complications have arisen in determining the best medium when
describing the revision strategies on computers. It seems that the relative ease of revision
afforded by a word processor would pair nicely with the natural recursivity of writing
(Eklundh & Kollberg, 1996; Lam, 1991), thus allowing students to produce more fluency
in their revisions (J iang & Cumming, 2001). That is, the word processor on a PC is a tool
that "facilitate[s] the mechanical processes of putting words on paper; revising text by

substitutions, deletions, additions, and block moves; and producing attractive and

19

readable finished copy" (Pennington, 2006, p. 298). Even so, research has found that
tools like usage and grammar checkers may inhibit normal revision strategies and result
in lower quality products (Smith, 1993).

Although at times conflicting, this body of research indicates that composing on
the computer is, at the very least, diflerent from using pen and paper. In fact, Eklundh
and Kollberg (1996) have suggested that the two environments are so different as to
involve different mental processes. It seems, thus, that Hayes (1996) was correct when
he questioned whether the real issue in writing research is in determining the medium
best suited to writing and not in describing each medium in order to understand how the
nature of it might influence the writing processes that will result.

Recent innovations in how the computer is being used as well as the capabilities
for its use have brought increased difficulties to the task of describing the medium and
understanding its effects on learner writing. At the same time, this task is becoming
increasingly more pressing as Warschauer has noted writing, "Many of our literacy
practices in education, work, and social life have moved off the page and onto the screen:
more and more people are doing the majority of their writing and reading on computer
and transmitting messages electronically rather than on paper" (as quoted in Pennington,
2003,p.297)

Just as researchers are faced with the task of describing the potential of certain
technologies for language development, so too are language practitioners confronted with
the reality that they must address the computer literacy needs of learners. Pennington
(2003) has said just this, writing

As the communicator of the present day and especially of the future is inevitably

20

linked to electronic media, those charged with instructing ESL students in writing

cannot afford to remain outside these developments, teaching without regard to

the communication technologies that are increasingly at the center of their

students' world. (p. 297)

To the end of keeping in stride with new technologies, this research has sought to
describe a technology that has yet to be studied—Googledocs—so that language
instructors might better understand how the integration of this new medium might
influence the writing processes of their learners.

Collaborative Writing and SLA

Stemming from cognitive and sociocultural interactionist backgrounds and the
age-old adage that two heads are better than one is the often-employed classroom practice
of collaborative work. What constitutes collaboration has been variously defined.
Collaboration is commonly viewed as the act of co-labor, or "working jointly with others
or together especially in an intellectual endeavor" (Merriam-Webster Online). A review
of collaborative literature as it relates to education echoes the common conception of
collaboration, often with an even narrower view (Arnold et al., 2009). In this research, a
distinction is often made between the otherwise conflated terms of collaborative and
cooperative learning. The former is a construct where “no single hand is visible in the
final product” (Haythomthwaite as quoted in Arnold et al., 2009) while the latter “entails
division of labor where tasks are split into sub-tasks in advance to be assembled into a
larger whole later on” (Arnold et al., 2009, p. 4). Clearly, cooperation is often more

efficient. If students just want to finish quickly, they may not wish to collaborate. In the

21

current study, collaboration is considered Haythornthwaite's (2006) definition where the
work of each collaborator is indistinguishable from the others in the end product.

A collaborative writing task, then, pairs or groups learners, assigns them a writing
task, and asks them to complete the task collaboratively. Previous research has suggested
that what occurs during collaborative writing extends beyond the "two heads are better
than one" philosophy noting that, "Distinctly higher order human cognition, including
planning (i.e., carrying out action on an ideal plane before doing so on the concrete
material plane) and rational thought, arises from [one's] participation in socially mediated
activity" (Lantolf, 2007, p. 878).

On the sociocultural front, Zuengler and Miller (2006) have noted the benefits of
collaborative work saying, "Of significance for SLA research is the understanding that
when learners appropriate mediational means, such as language, made available as they
interact in socioculturally meaningful activities, these learners gain control over their own
mental activity and can begin to function independently" (p. 30). In accordance with
Vygotsky (1978), Zuengler and Miller hold that the goal of collaborative work in the ESL
classroom is that learners will develop better cognitive and language skills so that they
might function independently in the future.

Apart from the general benefits previously reviewed of collaborative work in the
language classroom, proponents of collaborative writing list additional benefits for
learners: higher grammatical accuracy and complexity in produced texts (Storch, 2005);
learner-motivated negotiation of meaning and focus on the grammatical, lexical, and
discourse-level aspects of text (Donato, 1998; Storch, 2002; Swain & Lapkin, 1998;

Swain and Lapkin, 2002); aid in the development of analytical and critical skills

22

(N ystrand & Brandt, 1989); learning of new vocabulary and grammatical forms (Storch,
2001); concretization of a learner's awareness of audience during peer review (Leki &
Carson, 1993). Collaboration can provide learners with opportunities for output, noticing
the gap, hypothesis testing, and metalinguistic reflection--all of which may be critical to a
developing interlanguage (Swain, 1998; Swain, 2000; Swain & Lapkin, 2002).

The mere opportunity for collaboration, however, cannot ensure that effective
collaboration will ensue; groups and writing tasks must be selected and constructed
carefully. Research has found that the quality of collaborative interaction depends on the
individual group and its constituents (Dale, 1994; Johnson, Johnson & Smith, 1991 as
referenced in Arnold et al., 2009). Cognitive conflict has been found essential in
collaborative work, both in the quality and quantity of the interaction, and that the lack of
designed conflict greatly reduced student interaction (Dale, 1994). If the Output
Hypothesis is correct, it is precisely this interaction that is beneficial to learning; pairs
that do not interact much have lowered opportunities to learn (Storch, 2001).

Writing research has also found that closed writing tasks (Blake, 2000; Leki &
Carson, 1997; Pellettieri, 2000) promote negotiation because closed tasks, as opposed to
open tasks, have right answers. That is, writers must "accurately reflect" the content of
the source-text and, in so doing "the writer's representation of that content is discussable--
explainable--negotiable" (Carson, 2001, p. 198). Pellettieri (2000) found that goal-
oriented closed-tasks were positively correlated with quantity and type of negotiations
(i.e. form—focused negotiations) while Blake (2000) found similar benefits to closed-tasks
but noted that students tended to focus on surface, lexical negotiations rather than

content-related ones.

23

Perhaps the most comprehensive study noted here (and one which the current
research draws on heavily) is Storch's (2005) research which attempted to gain insight
into the collaborative versus individual writing process and to determine whether or not
one treatment held significant learning gains over the other. Storch examined both
treatments' written production as well as the collaborative groups' oral production. As for
the written production, she examined it quantitatively (fluency, accuracy, and
complexity) as well as qualitatively (a holistic scale measuring content and structure).
The dialogues were divided into total time spent on each area of planning, writing, and
revision. Her findings have suggested that collaborative writing, although generally
limiting the length of a piece, facilitates grammatical accuracy, sentential complexity, and
raises overall qualitative scores above that of both the class average and of students who
chose to work individually.

Innovative Ways to Teach Writing with Technology: Past and Current

So far the studies reviewed have included L2 collaborative writing in the
traditional face-to-face (F 2F) classroom setting. Recent budgetary and personnel
demands (Blake, 2001; Goertler & Winke, 2008; Sanders, 2005) in addition to
advancements in technology have made it both necessary and possible for collaborative
writing to assume a new shape. As the demand and possibility for innovative ways to
teach writing grow, research has moved away from viewing technology as inherently
neutral (e.g., Levy, 1997; Means, 1994 as referenced in Smith, Alvarez-Torres, and Zhao,
2003) or biased (e.g., Bromley, 1998 as referenced in Smith, Alvarez-Torres, and Zhao,

2003) and consequently exploring those qualities to admitting that the necessary path to

24

tread is describing the nature of these new technologies and their use in the classroom
(Barton, 1994 as referenced in Ortega, 1997).
Past: The Word Processor

Early research into the use and integration of technology into the classroom
focused primarily on the use of computers during writing tasks and the effects the new
medium had on the 1.) quality of the written products (Eklundh & Kollberg, 1996; 1220,
1996; Jiang, 2001; Lam & Pennington, 1995; Mehdi, 1994; Silver & Repa, 1993; Smith,
1993); 2.) the student reactions (Mehdi, 1994; Silver & Repa, 1993); and 3.) revision
strategies/process (Eklundh & Kollberg, 1996; J iang, 2001; Lam, 1991; Pennington,
2006; Smith, 1993).

Current: The Web 2.0

With the continuous changes in the intemet since its birth in the 19908, what has
been made possible with computers has fundamentally changed. Whereas Web 1.0 gave
people, originally scientists, a means to share a wide variety of information and research,
Web 2.0 is "a very different thing. It's a tool for bringing together the small contributions
of millions of people and making them matter. Silicon Valley consultants call it Web 2.0,
as if it were a new version of some old software. But it's really a revolution" (Grossman,
2006)

Web 2.0 has been both criticized as a "meaningless marketing buzzwor " and
praised as the "new conventional wisdom" (O'Reilly, 2005). Whatever one's attitude
towards the phrase may be, what is happening on the web is described as, "a story about
community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It's about the cosmic

compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people's network YouTube

25

and the online metropolis MySpace. It's about the many wresting power from the few and
helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also
change the way the world changes" (Grossman, 2006).

Grossman's description, however, is not complete. While it is true that Web 2.0
allows people to "harness collective intelligence" through multi-channel sharing and
building of a " global brain," it must be clarified that the changes in this so-called
revolution of 2.0-ness are "not something new, but rather a filller realization of the true
potential of the web platform" (O'Reilly, 2005). That is, Web 2.0 refers to the changes in
the "communicative uses of the underlying Web platform" (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008).
With Web 2.0 people are participating in the dynamism of the intemet, rather than just
using it as a static entity. Different from Web 1.0, where only the knowledgeable coder
could publish and the less-sawy rest of us could only passively view this information, the
new "interactive publishing" allows for "participation and networking through blogs,
wikis, and social network sites" (Warschauer & Grimes, 2008, p. 2). According to his
YouTube video, "Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us," Wesch (2007) illustrates how the
new web "facilitates data exchange, combining information" such that "Web 2.0 is linking
people [not information], people sharing, trading, and collaborating."

Today, the examples of intemet technology that link people include the now
common social networks (e.g., MySpace, Facebook, & Friendster), multiple-editor web
pages (e. g. Wikipedia), and computer mediated communication (CMC) (e.g. email,
instant messaging, intemet phone), etc. Of interest in the current study, and to which I
will now turn, is the last category: computer mediated communication.

CMC and Collaborative Writing

26

Perhaps nothing inherent in CMC's nature forces collaboration. However, as
technology has advanced and multiple user environments and applications made available
through Web 2.0 have become wide-spread, the tools available in computer mediated
contexts increasingly involve and/or require a certain level of cooperation (and, at times,
even collaboration). It is these later applications that have come to be (perhaps
auspiciously) coupled with SLA's sociocultural approaches which hold as their primary
tenet the belief that the root of learning is the interactions held within social situations.

At the same time that CMC has changed the learner-interaction (and perhaps even
the process, similar to how the word processor changed writing), it has also changed the
method for data collection.

Research has examined the nature of CMC technology and the promise it may
hold for second language learning. It should be understood early on in this discussion
that the tendency to lump all CMC technology together has been considered a grave
misrepresentation of the technologies in question (Smith, Alvarez-Torres, & Zhao, 2003).
Rather, CMC technologies should be differentiated based on the following descriptors:
temporality, anonymity, modality, and spatiality. One might also carefully consider
adding context which would include the capacity in which the technologies are being
used (Goertler, personal communication, March 2, 2010). For example, context would be
whether the task is supervised in the classroom or assigned outside as well as how that
assignment was framed. In short, the nature of a consumer's interaction (and the latter

perceptions of the interface/interaction) largely depends on the nature of the interface.1

 

1 Readers will notes how similar Smith, Alvares-Torres, and Zhao's (2003) point is to earlier claims made
by Hayes (1996) referring to the need to describe the system in which a writer functions in order to attempt
to predict or understand the processes of the writer.

27

Thus, any research on CMC must first begin with an understanding of the
technology and context in question as both of these will influence leamers' 1.)
interactions with the technology and other interlocutors and 2.) expectations of the
technology and the interlocutor(s) (Smith et. a1, 2003). For example, Zhao (1998) found
that senders may consider their message more carefully when they know that the receiver
will have immediate access to their message (i.e., in a synchronous context) while the
message's recipient, in turn, may feel the pressure to respond immediately. This pressure
may or may not be increased or lessened depending on whether or the students are
communicating in the same space, as is artificially produced in classroom use of these
tools. Such a critical examination of technology is not only imperative when carrying out
research, but also when planning to integrate technology use into the classroom.
Googledocs

Googledocs is one interface that enables people-linking. Essentially, Googledocs
is a collection of online services that allows users to "create and share [their] work
online" (Google, 201 0). Like other services in the Web 2.0 environment, Googledocs
does not rely on the PC or desktop to carry and store software. Rather, its services (e. g.
spreadsheets, word processing documents, and presentation software) are all accessed and
saved on the intemet. Because this is the case, files created in or uploaded to Googledocs
are editable from any location without the need upload or download documents to and
from a desktop. True to other Web 2.0 services, Googledocs also provides its users with
the option to share access to documents with other online users; and, because any
document revisions are done over the intemet, these changes are shared with

collaborators in real time. That is, Googledocs allows multiple users to collaborate both

28

synchronously and asynchronously and for the text revisions to be transmitted in near-real

time to all collaborators.

Googledocs in relation to other online tools. As there is no research that I am

aware of in the literature specific to Googledocs, it therefore seems necessary to highlight

the major findings of research of the closest relative that has received some attention, the

wiki. Table 1 below compares Googledocs and wikis according to the descriptors

outlined in Smith et. A1 (2003). For the purposes of comparison, let us assume that both

the Googledocs and wikis of which we speak are ones that are assigned as part of a

course's assignments.

 

Table 1

Googledocs Versus Wikis

 

 

Descriptor Googledocs Wikis
Temporality
(Synchronous or stncfsgitigr Asynchronously
Asynchronous) yn
Ranges from semi- .
. Ranges from serm-anonymous
. anonymous (1f use pseudo .
Anonymlty (if use pseudo screenname) to
screenname) to known . . .
(Anonymous or . known because ed1ts to w1k1
. . because ed1ts to does show . ,
known 1dent1ty) . , show up 1n log file under user 3
up 1n log file under user 5
screen name
screen name
Modality (Audio, Wr1tten text, 1rnages, selected

Video, Graphics)

Spatiality
(proxemics)

Context (In
classroom)

Written text, charts, graphs

Distant (no noticeable human
presence in edits)

Classroom, work, leisure.

wikis allow for audio
embedding

Distant (no noticeable human
presence in edits)

Classroom, work, leisure.

 

29

Research studies involving wikis have found a number of user behaviors that are
of interest in the current study. In an exploratory research study on the nature of student-
led collaboration during the construction of class wikis, Kessler and Bikowski (2010)
found that student groups moved through three phases of collaboration: construction with
deletions/rebuilding; expansion and participation; and personalization. In the first stage,
students tended to add and delete content from the areas they were personally responsible
for. There was little evidence of critical thinking in terms of synthesizing material across
student content. The final stage involved an "email-like" exchange which often strayed
from the content of the wiki. Other findings included that some students only minimally
participated (fulfilling the bare minimum requirements and then choosing to observe
others through the rest of the semester). Students reported finding the activity helpful but
what was expected of their role in the project ambiguous. To remedy these mild
complaints, Kessler and Bikowski (2010) recommended a discussion of the challenges of
the project in a pre-task training session.

Arnold et al. (2009) found that students mostly made meaning-changes and that
once content was added to the wiki page, it was not deleted. Unlike previous studies
predicted of a collaborative tool such as wikis, students did not exhibit behaviors
consistent with co-ownership; rather, they utilized the tool as a means towards division of
labor and thus increased efficiency. Mak and Coniam (2008) similarly found that the
addition of new ideas dominated the majority of student input onto the class wiki; little
revisions were made to the pre-existing content from earlier in the semester.

Beyond what behaviors students exhibit while collaborating with CMC and/or

SCMC tools, research with such technology offers the added benefit of gaining insight

30

into collaborative work and the students' mental processes. Oskoz and Elola (2008) have
found that wikis + voice/written chat provides more in-depth information about the
development of student drafts over time (as referenced in Sykes, Oskoz, &Thorne, 2008).

Other pedagogically-driven research is not so optimistic, some of it going so far
as to alert teachers to its potential downfall when integrated into classroom activities.
Schneider and von der Emde (2006) noted student sensitivity to certain issues assigned to
be discussed and found that students from two cultural backgrounds (German and
American) confronted serious difficulties when asked to discuss gun control (K6tter,
2006 as referenced in Fischer, 2007, p. 423). Cultural differences in methods of
communication such as formality (formal versus informal in European versus American
students) and directness (direct versus indirect in French and German versus American
students) also fueled controversy in O'Dowd (2006) and Bauer, deBenedette,
Furstenberg, Levet, and Waryn (2006), respectively. While it may be true that social
interaction provides ample opportunity for language learning, it might be equally true that
such interaction may prompt conflict. And, for the purposes of SLA research this conflict
is worth noting since it "can have a noticeable effect on the quality of communication"
(Fischer, 2007, p. 423).

Collaborative writing, CMC, and SLA

As noted earlier, tmiversities are being bombarded with a variety of fiscal
demands that make support of SCMC all the more appealing. Research into SCMC
offers additional benefits to the list. Citing multiple studies, Kaufman (2004) wrote,
"Computer, video, and wireless technologies have provided optimal media for the

application of constructivist principles to learning and teaching, created communities of

31

learners in electronic learning environments, and greatly enhanced student achievement
and teacher learning" (p. 306). Fortune (2005) added that these extended communities
have brought the ESL classroom into step with our globalizing society. The majority of
research drawing on interactionism has found that SCMC is the best way to promote
negotiation of meaning online (Kitade, 2000; Ketter, 2003; Toyoda & Harrison, 2002;
Tudini, 2003 as referenced in Kern, Ware, & Warschauer, 2004).

Traditionally, research into the collaborative writing process has had to rely on
voice-recorded student-talk to indicate the content of the communication between group
members during collaborative work. And, this research has given us plenty of valuable
information on the content of learner-talk. For example, Swain's (2001) research found
that during collaborative writing learners used a significant amount of meta-talk and
experienced multiple language related episodes (LREs) that indicated a strong natural
inclination towards focusing on form. Swain and Lapkin (1995) have defined LREs as
those parts during a dialogue where learners talk about, question, or correct the language
that they or their partners are producing (as referenced in Swain & Lapkin, 2002). The
use of CMC and/or SCMC has added benefits to gaining insight into collaborative work
and the students' mental processes. Oskoz and Elola (2008) have found that wikis +
voice/written chat provides more in-dept information about the development of student
drafts over time (as referenced in Sykes et. a1, 2008).

Other studies have more specifically targeted one type of SCMC—text-based
chat. Text-based chat is where people type messages to each other concurrently in real-
time using the Internet as an interface. The language used tends to be more

conversational than formal. Because it is more colloquial than formal, sentence fragments

32

tend to proliferate (Boehlke, 2003). Text-chat is easy to use (many students already
being familiar with the technology from their socializing in their L1) and presents many
options in the classroom for co-construction of writings. Healy (1997) found that chat
provided greater benefits to the learner because it "effectively bridg[ed] the gap between
written and oral expression for the linguistically limited student whose oral skills are not
adequate to allow for full expression of ideas in the target language" (as quoted in
Boehlke, 2003, p. 68). Studies involving text-chat have focused variously on students’
behavior and identity in this virtual environment (Kemp, 1993; Kessler, 2009); the
outcome (i.e., written production) of the collaboration (Braine, 2001); comparison of the
SCMC and the F2F environments (LREs—Shekary & Tahririan, 2006); amount of
discussion (Kemp, 2003; Kern, 1995, Warschauer, 1996; Boehlke, 2003); transfer of
chat-learning to subsequent novel situations (Blake, 2009; DiMatteo, 1991); effect of chat
on oral proficiency (Blake, 2009). No known studies have compared F2F and text-chat
collaboration through an examination of both the writing process and the subsequent
written production.
Collaboration and Beyond

Collaboration is of interest beyond the four walls of the language classroom as
well. In fact, collaboration in the workplace is an ever-increasing trend. And while
collaboration on text documents comprises only part of workplace collaboration, it
certainly is an important one because work groups must frequently work together to
produce texts (Hutchins, 1995 as referenced in Hayes, 1996). The integration of
collaboration into the classroom, then, serves not only to increase a.) the opportunities for

output practice and peer-peer interaction, b.) the likelihood that students will engage in

33

higher-order processing, and c.) the quality and complexity of the text produced, but also

serves to aid learners in developing necessary life skills.

34

 

CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY

The previous chapter offered a brief overview of the theoretical framework from
which this study draws as well as presenting a review of the research that has been done
in the field of writing, SLA, and CALL. Although a large body of research on L2
writing, collaborative writing in the L2, and writing in the L2 with computers exists,
research that combines all of these remains relatively small. In fact, such combined
research is primarily confined to studies in CALL and has focused on popular ICTs (e. g.,
instant messaging) and asynchronous collaborative writing tools (e. g., wikis and blogs).
As the classroom environment continues to shift both in response to fiscal restraints of
language programs and to changes in the society at large, research into other emerging
computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL) tools which allow for synchronous
interaction, such as Googledocs, becomes an increasing concern of researchers and
educators alike.

Research questions

In an attempt to advance our understanding of the nature of students' collaborative
writing processes using Googledocs, the current study set out to answer the following
research questions:

1. What are the student perceptions of the two environments (F 2F and CMC) in

terms of achieving students' language learning goals and are these perceptions

confirmed by the research findings?

2. What is the content of student talk during the composition process in a CMC

writing environment? How does this content compare with the same or similar

writing task in a F2F environment?

35

. an: _

3. How do the planning, collaboration, and peer revising influence the

development of the essays? Are these processes different between the CMC and

F 2F tasks?

4. Do the students in these two environments produce qualitatively different

products?

Participants

Participants in the present study were nonnative speakers of English enrolled in an
Intensive English Program (IEP) at a large, mid-western research university. This
language study preceded their enrollment in regular academic classes at the university.
The students (n= 21) were classified as hi gh-intermediate/advanced proficiency based on
an in-house English language test. They came from a variety of L1 backgrounds: Arabic
(1), Chinese (13), Japanese (2), Korean (4), and Italian (1) and ranged in age fiom 19 to
27 years.
Case Study Participants

In order to get an in-depth look at the nature of Googledocs in respect to research
questions two, three, and four, two case study students were followed through all four
writing tasks. These case study students were picked because they were of the few who
were never paired together such that, by studying them, I was able to study a wider
sample of the total class. Also, since a large part of this study’s purpose is to inform
pedagogical practices, it was deemed important to pick two students of differing language
proficiencies as they would more accurately represent the variety of learners typical in an

ESL classroom.

36

The first case study participant (EU) was a 22 year-old L1 Korean female student.
She was studying at the Language Center as part of her junior-year study abroad. In a
self-evaluation, EU reported low proficiency in typing and English skills. The second
case study participant (MC) was a 20 year-old L1 Chinese female student. She was
studying at the Language Center in preparation for matriculation into regular academic
courses at the university. MC self-reported high proficiency in use of the computer and
the English language. Both students attended classes regularly and were present during
the training session and all four writing tasks.

Procedures

Paired participants engaged in four collaboratively written essays over the course
of the second-half of a semester-long IEP writing-content-grammar class. When it was
possible, students were paired with a new partner for each new writing task. Each of the
four writing assignments was completed approximately two weeks apart. Three of the
four writing sessions occurred within the 120-minute regularly scheduled writing course
and lasted 90 minutes. The extra class time before and after was used to address any
questions about the prompt and to debrief on the particular writing task, respectively.
The class was divided into two subsets, each subset with a variety of skills and Lls.
Originally, it was intended that the subsets would flip-flop through the four tasks as seen

in Table 2 below.

37

 

 

Table 2

Original Plan for Counterbalanced Tasks

 

 

Week 1 Week 4 Week 5 Week 7
Environment Environment Environment Environment
Subsets
A (10 students) CMC F2F CMC F2F
B (11 students) F2F CMC F2F CMC

 

Because of several unforeseeable problems (e. g., absences during training session,
availability of computer labs), the original counterbalancing had to be modified as
reflected in Table 3 below. Although not an ideal research situation, this revised version
allowed me to investigate the applicability of Googledocs as they might be used
authentically in a classroom (i.e., to assign unsupervised collaborative work to be

completed outside of the classroom).

 

Table 3

Actual Task Breakdown

 

 

Week 1 Week 3 . Week 5 Week 7
Environment Environment Environment Environment
Subsets
A (6 students) CMC F2F All students F2F All students
B (14 students) F2F CMC CMC

 

Since the writing tasks were built in to the syllabus for the course, participants
were required to attend and participate in all 4 writing sessions. Participation in the
study, however, was voluntary, and students were made aware through a third-party of
their rights to decline having their data included in the current research. Collaborative

groups included 2 students, with the exception of a 3-person group when all 21 students

38

were present. All but two students participated in all four writing sessions using Google
Docmnents with a partner; for all students, two of the essays were written F 2F and two in
a CMC environment although these task environments were not counterbalanced for all
participants (see Table 3 above). In order to allay student fears of "fairness" and because
student attendance was not always predictable, student-pairs changed with each essay.
Class Description, Context, and Writing Environment

Students in this writing course were familiar with the writing process (pre-
writing/brainstorming activities, writing, reviewing/revising) because the course involved
a variety of assignments in addition to the 4 reviewed in the current research. As part of
the regular IEP curriculum, all students participated in a three-day learner training
program, parts of which involved training in the role of collaboration and group work in a
communicative language learning program as well as general teacher expectations of
group work. Additionally, all students were specifically trained on how to review a
peer's draft in a peer review. Peer review, focusing on feedback about content,
development, and organization, was stressed over peer editing.

From the beginning of the semester until mid-terms, students spent approximately
25% of in-class and out-of-class time reading and analyzing short stories (Chopin, 1894;
Collier, 1952; Maupassant, 1952; Saroyan, 1952) as well as watching, discussing, and
analyzing movies (Erickson, 1993; Haft, 1989). These assignments comprised the
content component of the writing-content-grammar course. Adapting Daniels' (2001)
pedagogical model for literature circles,2 student groups lead their own small-group
discussion on pieces of literature. This was done by students self-assigning specific roles

to each of the four group members. Whole—class discussions and a second round of

 

2 See Appendix D for example adaptations and roles

39

individual free-writes followed these in-class small group discussions. Students thus
participated in the collaborative assignments after extensive individual and group work
with both the literature and the movies. Therefore, assuming students had regularly
attended and participated in class, each student had a variety of previous writings and
notes on each reading and movie such that they were appropriately prepared to write on
the content of the course.

All writing sessions were conducted in a university computer desktop laboratory.
The room sizes ranged from small (capacity for 16) to large (capacity for 30). Students
working in F2F pairs were sitting at and sharing one computer. CMC pairs, on the other
hand, were dispersed throughout the room such that one row of computers might have a
mixture of both task environments. All computer labs had data projectors onto which a
large, digital clock was displayed for the entire ninety minutes. There were three video
cameras placed in the room: one in the back (capturing the computer screens), one to the
side of room (capturing an angle of almost all students), and one in the front (capturing
the student’s faces). Students were permitted to have out any and all of their own
original notes, handouts, and/or original texts.
Pilot Study

The writing prompts were evaluated by a second IEP teacher who had previously
taught the course with the same content (i.e., the same short stories and movies). An SLA
researcher with expertise in writing reviewed all prompts and directions; feedback fi'om
this review was incorporated into revisions to the formatting and content of these
components, where appropriate. Then, a pilot study was conducted with four advanced

ESL learners two weeks prior to the beginning of the in-class writing tasks. Feedback

40

from the pilot made it clear that a more extensive training session to familiarize students
with the interface would be necessary than had been previously planned. An hour-long
practice simulation was thus scheduled. The students in the pilot also requested more
explicit directions about what was expected of them as well as strategies they might use
to accomplish the task.
Training session

' Seventeen of the twenty-one participants were present in class during the hour-
long training session. As a result of the feedback from the pilot study, the task began
with an overview of the rules of the task and how it would be graded. The teacher gave a
PowerPoint presentation making it explicit that the task was going to be graded on both
the process in terms of collaboration and participation of both students as well as the
product in terms of the quality of the final essay product. Students were made aware that
the essay would be graded in‘ accordance with the standard holistic writing assignment
rubric from class which focused on content, development, organization, and language use
(see Appendix A).

All participants were shown how to use the text-based chat feature of Gmail to
communicate with their partner over the intemet while composing an essay in a
Googledocs. The researcher also explained how Googledocs works in terms of saving
information over the intemet such that a short delay would allow them to see their
partner's additions to the document. Students were told that the program automatically
saved their writing but that they could also manually save by clicking on the file icon

(just like in a Word document).

41

at :1]

6X31

C0!

C0!

dc

While the teacher-researcher did not include the revision views and their function
at the time of training, the basic functioning of the program was explained through some
examples projected for the class over the data projector. The teacher-researcher also
explained that text-chat and Googledocs edits were digitally recorded on internet server
logs. This made some students anxious because they thought their work would somehow
be lost, and they would lose credit for the assignment. Despite a demonstration to the
contrary, some students still felt more comfortable emailing me their final draft after
completing the assignment in Googledocs.

After this brief introductory lecture, students were given partners and a scaled-
down practice writing prompt and allowed to begin writing and familiarizing themselves
with the interface. This low-stakes training session included practice using the direction
sheets to navigate the intemet, log into Gmail, access the Googledocs, and use the
computer text-chat and Googledocs. Following the training session, the class debriefed
about the task in regards to any expertise and/or strategies they discovered while working
through the practice task. This sharing of information served to minimize anxiety levels
and questions during the actual experiment. Research has shown that one major
impediment to successful CALL learning is lack of training (e. g., Hubbard, 2004); a
corollary of this is how important training is in reducing frustrations and prepping
students for success.

Writing Task

Prior to the writing session, twenty Google accounts were created under

pseudonyms. Then, the researcher created ten Googledocs, entered the writing prompt,

and shared the documents through the independent Google accounts. Each pair had one

42

Googledocs in which they were to type their essays, regardless of whether they were
completing the task in a F2F or SCMC setting. Students were also given a hard copy of
the prompt as well as a detailed instruction sheet to access the document.

The writing prompts were situated within the context of the content portion of the
writing class. That is, they were relevant to the class discussions and class work that had
been completed in previous class sessions. In this sense, the prompts were closed-ended
and text-responsible as described by Leki and Carson (1997) so as to be "discussable—
explainable—negotiable" (Carson, 2001, p. 198). Writing prompts were also created to
force conflict (Dale, 1994) as they required students to present and defend their opinions.

In 4 subsequent sessions, participants logged on to computers, were given the
essay prompts, and were given ninety minutes to complete the task. These tasks were
audio and video recorded. During the ninety-minute writing sessions, students were
permitted to refer to any of their own or their partner's notes and/or writings as well as the
source texts but, in the interest of keeping students on-task, were not permitted to share
between paired writing groups. Use of any other outside sources was strictly prohibited
and video cameras were ostensibly set up in the classroom to curb any temptation to
violate these rules.

Post-task

Following each writing session, participants debriefed orally on that particular
writing task and then student questionnaires were distributed to be completed as a
homework assignment. Although students were not specifically required to continue
working with the text created in these writing sessions, they were encouraged to consider

using some of the ideas generated in the collaborative writing sessions in subsequent

43

formal papers or to revise the collaborative essays for inclusion in their semester-final

writing portfolios.

Data Analysis
Googledocs Revision History
Googledocs periodically saves to the written text being editing. These saves
include both the frequent Googledocs-initiated saves (occurring approximately every
minute) and the student-initiated saves (varying in frequency depending on the pair's and
individual's saving habits). The record of revisions can be accessed for each document
by viewing the "revision history". An individual typing into Googledocs would have a

screen much like a Word document. A sample screen shot is shown in Figure 2 below.

 

   

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Thls IS me writing an example sentence

In Googledocs.

“.9932... =£:§-'~r;.u. 2 '.; 1 av. fiwfiaflfl er .. '. i .. -. 14“]

 

 

Figure I. A Screenshot of Googledocs

When used synchronously, both collaborators can contribute to and edit the document at

the same time. There is a short delay as each person's Googledocs saves the information

44

and then transmits it to all collaborators. So, a collaborator might take the sentence in

Figure 2 above and edit it as shown in Figure 3 below.

 

   

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This is me—2 editing a silly example sentence
in Googledocs. Me-2 will even add a sentence
at the end.

 

 

 

Figure 2. A Screenshot of a Second Person Editing the Googledocs

The third screen shot below shows the revision history page (See Figure 4). This is the

first of the two revision views available in Googledocs. This screen allows you to select

to revisions to compare.

45

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Figure 3. Googledocs “Revision History” Screen Shot

After one has selected revisions to compare, Googledocs will then color-code the

revisions based on who made the revision. See Figure 5 below for a screen shot of this.

The color-coding scheme works best when texts are constructed asynchronously, as will

be explained below.

46

 

 

 

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Figure 4. Screenshot of Googledocs “Compare” Revisions Page

The second of the two options available when reviewing the revision histories, is
to skim through the revisions in pseudo real-time. I say “pseudo” because, when two
people are editing synchronously, Googledocs is also saving their work synchronously.
This means that, assuming that both collaborators are actively editing, the revision logs
jump between the revisions that collaborator A is creating and the saves that are
occurring in parallel on collaborator B’s screen. To an inexperienced viewer expecting a
true real-time recounting of the synchronous collaboration, it might seem like
collaborator B is deleting collaborator A’s work and then proceeding to add precisely
what he/she just deleted. Although this makes for messy data collection, the advantage to

this small delay is that the collaborative experience can be recreated. Once one

47

establishes who is making a revision, the researcher is able to see how quickly and how
noticeable the revisions that are being transmitted truly are.

A record of Googledocs saves was analyzed using a modified version of F aigley
and Witte's (1981) coding scheme. The Faigley and Witte's (1981) taxonomy was chosen
because it has been used in a variety of research involving both L1 and L2 writing (e. g.,
Connor & Asenavage 1994; Min, 2006; Paulus, 1999). The taxonomy was also recently
adapted in a study of collaboration and revision behavior in a class wiki project (Arnold
et. al, 2010) and shown to be a useful and reasonable instrument when applied to CMC
environments. Finally, F aigley and Witte's (1981) taxonomy seems fitting because
Googledocs is a collaborative tool that records revision history. It therefore seems
appropriate to analyze the revision history with a measure has been used to analyze the
revision of written texts.

Faigley and Witte (1981) developed their taxonomy based on two major
distinctions: surface changes and text-based changes. This major branching divides those
changes which, through addition or deletion of information, result in a change "that it
[meaning] cannot be recovered through drawing inferences" (Faigley & Witte, 1981, p.
402). The former (surface changes) leave a reader with enough information to infer
whatever information may have been deleted while the latter (text-based changes) make
such inferences impossible. Surface changes are further subdivided into formal changes
(spelling; tense, number, and modality; abbreviation; punctuation; and format) and
meaning-preserving changes (additions; deletions; substitutions; permutations;
distributions; and consolidations). On the second branch lie the text-based changes

which include microstructure and macrostructure changes. The distinction between these

48

two revisions lies in the fact that the former revisions do no alter the overall summary (or
gist) of a text whereas the latter do. Since some (Arnold, Ducate, & Kost, 2009; Polio,
personal communication, March 12, 2010) have found this last distinction between macro
and micro structures cumbersome and unproductive, I have chosen to disregard it.
Following previous studies applying oral data coding schemes to CMC data (e. g.
Pellettieri, 2000), all F2F sessions were transcribed verbatim. Some CMC groups chose
to chat both in the Googledoc itself and/or in the Gmail chat window; both of these chat
histories were included in the analysis of chat logs. The oral transcripts and CMC chat
logs were coded following an adapted version of Storch (2005). Storch (2005) looked at
the discussion content of a collaborative writing task in a F2F environment. Storch
(2005) first divided transcripts into the planning, writing, and revision phases before
looking for topical focus areas that occurred emically. An adapted version of those
themes can be found in Table 4 on the next page. For the purposes of this study, "task
clarification" included any questions about the prompt and general directions for the task
or tools involved (directed towards the teacher or a peer); "task management" included
discussion about time or how the task would or should be carried out (e. g. division of
labor); and, "organization" (formerly "structure") encompassed all episodes where
learners talked about how the essay should be organized. Table 4 below summarizes the

coding categories from Storch (2005) and offers some examples from the current project.

49

 

Table 4

Starch (2005 ) adapted coding scheme

 

Focus area

Description

Example

 

Task Clarification

Task Management

Generating Ideas

LREs

Organization

Episodes where learners read
or discuss the given
instructions

Episodes in which the learners
deliberate over and delegate
tasks

Episodes where learners
generate and reforrnulate ideas

Episodes in which the learners
deliberate over lexical or
grammatical choices (Swain &
Lapkin, 1998)

Episodes where learners focus
on the organization of ideas

EU: we have to show the
authors' thought and compare
it with our thought?

AL: Where did it say?on the
paper?

EU: yeah

EU: Then, how about
separate the part? For
example, one write the intro
and conclusion and the other
write the 2 bodies?

FE: Yes. This is what I did
before

MC: now what you wanna
write about?

EU: Mr. Keating have
CH: haaaaas. Has.
EU: has

SE: How bout just dividing
into two parts. Like the
Lottery novels is talking
aobut the wrong way of
morality and this horse story
is talking aobut the right way
of morality

 

50

 

Table 4 (cont’d).

 

SE [narrates & types]: The

Episodes in which the learners two authors...talk about

. . simply read or re-read the text morality between fight and
Readlng/re-readmg they had composed (only wrong '
ca tured in F2F environment) [re-reads] The two authors
p talk about morality between

right and wrong...way.

 

Following each task, students completed a survey that contained a self— and peer-
assessment as well as nine questions on a 5-point Likert scale and a number of open-
ended questions. The nine questions asked students to respond to the collaboration, the
task environment, and their perception of their learning during the session. The open-
ended questions asked students to summarize what worked well/poorly in the
collaborative session and why, as well as what they found challenging and easy about the
task environment. They were also asked to describe how their pair went about
completing the task and to which parts of the collaborative effort they had contributed
(See Appendix B). All returned surveys are reported in the data analysis.

Two raters met to discuss and grade the final compositions of the eight essays
included in the case-study. The raters read the essays, making comments about the same
categories with which students were familiar (i.e., content, development, organization,
and language see again) (See Appendix A). They were then asked what grade they would
give such an assignment on a 4.0 scale (where 2.5 is passing and only 0.5 increments are
allowed). The grades for each essay were then recorded and averaged.

All of these data, the Googledoc edits, the F2F transcripts, the chat logs, the

surveys, and the holistic essay scores were used to answer the research questions. Table

51

5 below summarizes the research questions, the data collected, and how the data has been

analyzed.

 

Table 5

Research questions, data, and analysis

 

 

Research Question Data collected Data analyzed
F2F: Audio and video F2F audio
. transcripts:
RQl: Content of recording; Storch (2005)
student talk during
writing process and CMC chat logs,
hOW talk compares CMC: Chat transcripts, Googledoc

across environments

RQ2: How planning,
collaboration, and
revision affect
development of
essay

RQ3: How products
across environments
compare
qualitatively

RQ4: Student
perception of
environments and
learning

Googledoc transcripts (in-
text chat)

F2F: Audio and video
transcripts; survey reports

CMC: Chat transcripts,
survey reports, revision
history

Essay produced

Survey responses

Student comments

transcripts (in-text
chat): Storch
(2005)

Storch (2005),
survey
means/themes
responses, Faigley
& Witte (1981)

Holistic rating
fiom two raters

Means

Emic theme coding

 

52

CHAPTER FOUR
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

Data were collected over an eight-week period in which students received training
and then participated in four collaboratively written essays using Googledocs in two
environments: face-to-face and computer-mediated. The data collected included
Googledoc revision logs, transcripts of student conversation, chat logs, final essays
produced, and student surveys. All of these data were examined in order to gain insight
into how students utilized Googledocs as a collaborative writing tool. After giving an
overview of student comments towards the tool (the survey), I will turn to an in-depth
analysis of the case-study participants.

Results: Surveys

It is with the first research question that I begin the analysis because it offers the
broadest look at student perceptions of the two task environments. The questionnaire was
administered to all students directly following each writing task to investigate how they
felt about that task in terms of their collaborative efforts, response to the environment,
and their perception of learning. The questionnaire began with a self— and partner-
assessment and was followed by nine questions sealed with 5-point Likert response
ratings and several open-ended responses.

Perception of Collaboration

Likert responses. Regardless of the task-environment, in a self-assessment
responding to the question, "I believe that my group participation grade for today is 1.0/
2.0 / 3.0 / 4.0 (circle one), where 1.0 = needs lots of improvement; 2.0 = needs some
improvement; 3.0 = good enough to get a good grade; 4.0 = excellent" (Refer to

Appendix B again for a sample survey), students generally felt that they participated "3.0

53

= well enough to get a good grade". Mean answers for these self-ratings across all four
tasks can be found in Table 6 below. Students tended to rate their partner's participation
above their own and this average was also above a 3.0 across all tasks and environments.

Although the tasks were designed as text-responsible (Leki & Carson, 1997) and
debatable (Dale, 1994) in order to force students to engage in a communicative activity
with substantial interaction, only a few students reported having to discuss with their
partners to reach agreement on what they would write about. In fact, mean scores for
students in the F2F context in response to question 1, "It was difficult because my partner
and I couldn't agree" (where 1= strongly disagree; 2= somewhat disagree; 3= neutral; 4=
somewhat agree; 5: strongly agree) were nearly neutral in task 1 (M = 2.93) and
decreased to more strongly disagreeing for task 2 (M = 2.0) and task 3 (M= 2.14).
Similar responses were reported by the CMC group, but even less conflict was reported
here for the tasks: task 1 (M = 2.5), task 2 (M = 1.82), and task 4 (M = 1.95). An
independent t-test suggested that the differences between the mean scores for the 2
environments were not significant for either the self- or peer-assessment (p= 0.33 and p=
0.31, respectively); neither were they significant for question 1 (p= 0.25). See Table 6
for a summary of the means, standard deviations, and p-values.

Open-ended responses. The open-ended questions eliciting specific reactions to
the collaborative tasks demonstrated a variety of student reactions. Some student
responses echoed their Likert responses as in the following, "We had a lot of same ideas
for the article, it was easy to agree with eachother" (LA, F 2F, task 1). However, unlike

the Likert responses, many open-ended responses revealed that student pairs experienced

54

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56

different opinions and/or difficulty arriving at a consensus with their partners. For
example, "Sometimes, we have different opinion. Because everyone has own definition
of love" (JO, CMC, task 1). Others mentioned that the source of conflict was not just
reconciling both opinions but also combining different writing skills and styles, "We
disagreed with each other at first. Although we have the same Opinion about the movie,
we have different writing skills and methods that maked us lose a lot of time. So it is a
little bit hard for us to write the essay" (KI, F2F, task 3).

Over half of the students stated that, while collaborative writing might be more
difficult than writing alone, it could offer them some additional benefits. These reported
benefits included generating and sharing ideas, checking work, and dividing work to be
more efficient.

Several additional themes emerged among the responses: division of labor;
discussion adding to the ease of group work and/or arguments detracting from the group
work; and ability or inability to write a clear and cohesive essay. Although most groups
noted that they were discussing the texts and their opinions, over half of the groups
reported dividing the tasks to some degree instead of working together through the
duration of the task. Surprisingly, this division of labor seemed to be a common theme
across tasks, regardless of environment. For example, one organized delegation of tasks
came from a F2F group in task 3, "Today we have 3 partner together create one article.
First, one person type an idea, and others discuss next controlling idea. Then we all
check the cohesion, grammar, connection problem" (LA, F 2F , task 3). It is important to
note that, while certainly not a majority, a few F2F and CMC groups reported

collaborating throughout the task. YU in F2F task I wrote, "I wanted to do this work

57

 

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together, so I tried to talk equally and type evenly. Also, I talked about my opinion and
my experience and we could agree with each other. I thought [my partner] tried to tell
her opinion actively and ask my opinion, so we could discuss about our opinion
efficiently." From a CMC environment, 1 student reported that, "We wrote it together
each part. . . . We have lots of chat, So just exchange our idea" (JO, CMC, task 4).
Response to Environment

Likert responses. Students tended to have a fairly neutral reaction to the writing
environment. In response to question 2, "I loved this activity," students' mean answers
were slightly less than neutral for both F2F (M = 2.99, SD = 0.29) and CMC (M = 2.65,
SD = 0.28) environments with CMC being the more negative of the two. Of note were
slight increases in interest in the third task, when the whole class completed the writing
task F 2F (M e 3.24) and the fourth task, when the whole class participated by CMC (M =
2.81). An independent t-test revealed that these differences were not significant (p-value
= 0.11). See Table 6 above for a summary of the findings.

Student ratings in answer to question 9, "I liked using Googledocs to compose my
essay" consistently increased across the four tasks with mean ranges from 3.07 to 3.29 for
F2F (M = 3.12, SD = 0.15) and 2.5 to 3.1 for CMC (M = 2.74, SD = 0.31). An
independent t-test revealed that responses to question 9 were approaching significance (p-
value = 0.07). When asked if they would like to do more assignments like this one in
class (question 6), students ranged from strongly agreeing to strongly disagreeing. The
mean response showed a steady but small increase across the four tasks for both
environments (M= 2.64 - 2.71, SD= 0.2 and M= 2 - 2.76, SD= 0.43 for F2F and CMC,

respectively) but were not significant (p= 0.41).

58

Perception of Learning. When students were asked to respond to the statement "I
think writing with another person in this manner is good language practice" in question 4,
most students fell between being neutral (3) and somewhat agreeing (4). Overall,
students seemed slightly to favor the F2F environment (M= 3.66, SD= 0.14) over CMC
(M=3.37, SD=0. 15). Both environments experienced a dip in the second task and a rise
by the next task in that environment (i.e., task 3 for F2F and task 4 for CMC). An
independent t-test indicated that this variation was significant (p= 0.01) and Cohen's d
showed a very large effect size (d== 3.77). These fluctuations could be a result of
students’ rising familiarity and comfort with the tools. Similar dips and rises can be
noted in response to "I feel like I learned something today" but these did not result in any
significance. This could have occurred because the average student reported somewhat
agreeing that he/she learned, regardless of the task environment. See Table 6 above.

Case-Studies

Because the purpose of this study is to better understand Googledocs in terms of
how it might function as a CSCL in an ESL classroom, I have zeroed in on how two
students used the tool during the collaborative writing process. This case-study approach
offers significant insight into the implications of using Googledocs as a collaborative
language learning tool.
Participant EU

Perception of task. EU's responses underscore some of the general comments
made by the class. With the exception of the third task, she reported dividing the task
with her partner, being responsible for writing parts like the introduction and/or the

conclusion. She admitted, "I had some difficulty because I'm not good at typing. So it

59

tooks much time." She also mentioned that she "felt confusing" and uncomfortable
because "We should type and shouldn't talk. So, it took much time." After her first essay
experience, she wrote that she would like to work collaboratively again, "but I don't want
to do with computer. It is uncomfortable. I think it is better to communicate face to
face." By essay 3, however, her opinions about collaboration in general were changed,

It [writing F2F] is easier than writing by chatting but yet it is hard to write one

essay with partner. Because, of course, we have different ideas. Of course we can

learn something and improve our writing still by negotiating, but negotiating is
hard because we are not good at English.(EU, essay 3 F 2F)
After the final essay, in CMC, she explained that the Googledoc made it confusing
"because we don't know what others write. I will use it [Googledocs] when I am far
away from each other but I won't use at the same time."

Content of student—talk As seen in Table 7 below, the distribution of the content
of student talk was not the same across all 4 tasks for all areas of student-talk. EU and
her CMC partners tended to spend most of their talk clarifying and managing the task
such that the pair could part ways with a clear idea of the directions and what each
individual was going to do to accomplish the writing task. The second most significant
topic of conversation (M= 25.06, SD= 1.77) was the generation of ideas. When in a F2F
environment, EU and her partners had a more diverse conversation. These groups spent
some time, albeit brief, talking about grammar and managing the task in addition to
generating ideas and organizing the task. A review of the transcripts indicates that

managing the task in the F2F environment was usually limited to who would type the

60

essay or take notes during the brainstorming. In comparison with the CMC environment,

EU and her partners spent relatively little time explicitly managing or clarifying the task.

61

 

 

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62

Effect of planning, collaboration, and peer revision on essay. In essay 1, EU and
her partner began their chat session with an attempt to generate ideas. It soon became
clear, however, that there was some confusion about what the pair ought to do during the
task. The pair then spent six rrrinutes discussing the task (i.e., clarifying what was
required in the task and who would tackle each part of that requirement). Excerpt 1

below is taken from the Gmail chat transcript where EU chats with her partner, AL.

 

Excerpt 1

EU & AL Gmail Text Chat Transcript from EU CMC Essay 1

 

AL: if we have to compare we can just state the thesis of 2 novels or we dont have to
compare just state the thesis and the main idea

EU: I think we should compare

AL: but it didnt say in the intruduction [instructions ?]

AL: we just need to compare to our own beliefs

AL: do u want to do the body or u want me to do it

EU: do the body?

AL: introduction,body and conclusion

EU: you mean, what I want to do?

AL: yeas

EU: I don't careeeeeee

It is so confusinggg t t

AL: ok,i will do the body, can you write intro and conclusion?

AL: yeah,we do some free writing then we can start write so our intr, body and
conclusion should be about " love is free"

EU: but I am so confusing we have to show the authors' thought and compare it with
our thought?

AL: where did it say?on the paper?

EU: yeah

AL: where?

EU: your sheet Describe how the author portrays~ and then compare/contrast it to your
own beliefes

AL: i will do that part

EU: Ah I understand

AL: once u finished intro and conclusion,YOU can give me some ideas about it and i
will write it

i mean you can give me ideas about the 2 story which you think are important than i
can add it into pur paper

 

63

After agreeing that their thesis would be "love is free," the pair said they would freewrite
individually on their respective papers. However, after a mere three minutes, AL asks
EU if she can see her writing in the Googledoc. Seven minutes later, EU responds
"yeaa." Although the original plan was for EU to share her ideas with AL, there is no
exchange of these ideas over chat nor is there chatting within the Googledoc itself. In
fact, there is no explicit communication between the partners until AL types that she is
done writing her section forty-seven minutes after the two begin writing. With twenty
minutes remaining, AL announces that she will go back and edit EU's part for grammar
errors and that EU should do the same to which EU responds, "yes I will. And you can
delete or add to my part." A review of the Googledoc revision history shows that they
made a few additional changes above the surface-level edits to which they agreed. Table
10 on the next page provides an overview of the revisions conducted collaboratively

following the adapted version of F aigley and Witte (1981).

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65

Clearly, AL is doing most of the revisions. After ten minutes of reviewing the other's
work and five minutes before time is called, AL states "I changed some words [. . .] we
are done."

In essay 4, EU and her partner displayed a few differences from that of the prior
essay. This pair began with some task management before generating ideas. This
generation of ideas included a mutual sharing of information as the two tried to decide
which topic they could write about, without it being too difficult for them. Afier deciding
on a topic, the two originally divide the task by introduction/conclusion and body
paragraphs as they did in previous writing tasks but then decide that it would be better to
have one person compare and the other contrast. The chat also indicates that the two did
not spend time brainstorming separately but rather together until they had a thesis both
were comfortable writing about. Then, they began writing and wrote individually for
forty-one minutes.

If essay 1 had little collaborative revision between the partners EU and AL, essay
4 had even less. In this task, EU's partner, FE, asked EU for help in revising the essay.
He wrote, "help me to check it." EU, however, was done with the assignment when she
finished writing and responded, "it 3 ok. let's finish. haha." It should not be surprising,
then, that the pair shared only two revisions, and these were revisions in the format of the
document. That is, fairly early on FE moved the paragraphs around so that there were
some extra spaces between the text blocks and each could write his/her separate
paragraph without crowding the text block of his/her partner.

These behaviors are in stark contrast to what can be observed from the audio

transcripts of EU’s F2F essays. In essay 2, both students began the task by participating

66

in a quality exchange while generating ideas. But, EU’s partner, SE, took charge early on
by self-electing to take notes during the brainstorming. She then assumed the role of
typing when EU asked SE, "Can you do the typing?" Immediately following this request,
EU begins to narrate aloud some ideas for what SE should write, and SE reforrnulates
EU's words while typing them into the Googledoc. These transcripts and reformulations

are shown in Excerpt 2 below.

 

Excerpt 2
EU & SE Oral Transcripts from EU F 2F Essay 2

 

Oral transcripts Googledocs
EU: two stories...and the Beautiful White
Horse...the authors

 

SE: How can I...How can I start? In the two stories, "The Lottery" and "The
SE: First, the author...the authors say that Summer of the Beautiful White Horse", the
morality authors talk about the morality of the

EU: to follow tradition villagers from the traditions. The two

SE: traditions of the authors show the different morality and

EU: [Korean] traditions that one side is wrong and another
--- side is right. The morality does depend on
SE: They can the each of the tradition from the two stories.
SE:What can I write? In "the Lottery", Jackson

EU: Stories show that...uh...show that
morality and tradition

[EU narrates and S types]

[SE continues typing w/o EU narrating]
S: Who is the author of "The Lottery"?
E: Jackson

S: Jackson?

 

It is worth noting that towards the end of the excerpt, SE is beginning to assume control
of the writing task. She begins composing and typing, only consulting EU when she
needs information about the stories (e. g. the author's name). Despite SE's decision to do

most of the writing, EU remains engaged by reading what SE writes, offering periodic

67

corrections. Excerpt 3 below continues the conversation from Excerpt 2 above,

illustrating this shift in control.

 

Excerpt 3
EU & SE Oral Transc‘rgymom EU F 2F Essay 2

 

SE: What do you think? Jackson defines the morality as...as...um?

EU: She defines the morality as

SE: What is morality of this story and this story? This story is honesty.

EU: Honesty. Maybe I remember too. Jackson thinks the

[SE sighs and deletes]

SE: Jackson

SE: The morality is [deletes] depends on

EU: and in the Lottery people become have question about the old tradition and then
SE: Before this sentence we need

[SE re-reads]

SE: Ahhh! [Korean] Ah!

SE: [types and narrates] and other side is right

[types but no narration]

SE: depend on the tradition. On the each of the tradition

[types but no narration]

SE: In the Lottery, Jackson, Jackson shows that the village's tradition...um... was [deletes]
as them [deletes] some View? is...

EU: pick, pick?

SE: Eh? pick

EU: c, c,

 

Interestingly, both the audio recording and the survey make it clear that SE not only did
most of the work, but that she became increasingly more frustrated with EU for not
contributing to the assignment.

In contrast to the above experience in essay 2, essay 3 involved a more
collaborative work. Both worked together to compose their essay, beginning with
generating ideas and deciding on their essay’s structure. When they began to write, they
traded off typing with EU's partner, CH, responsible for the majority of it. Although 1

student typed, both were orally composing the essay and reforrnulating it before typing it

68

into the Googledoc. After it was typed, they often re-read aloud what they had written, a
process that often resulted in LREs.

Holistic scores. EU and her partner's scores seemed to vary quite a bit across
tasks and environments. However, her mean score for CMC was M: 2.38, considerably
lower than her mean score in F 2F at M= 3.13. Percent rater agreement was 93.75 across

all 4 of EU's essays. See Table 9 below for a summary of these findings.

 

Table 9

EU Holistic Essay Scores by Environment

 

 

 

 

CMC EU Essay 1 EU Essay 4 M SD
Rater 1 3 2

Rater 2 2.5 2

M 2.75 2 2.38 0.53
% Rater agree 87.5 100

F2F EU EssaL2 EU Essay 3 M SD
Rater 1 3 3.5

Rater 2 2.5 3.5

M 2.75 3.5 3.13 0.53
% Rater agree 87.5 100

Participant MC

Student perception. In contrast to EU, MC began with a F 2F task. After her first
collaborative experience, her responses pertained mostly to the idea of writing an essay
with another person rather than to the tool, Googledocs, in particular. She wrote, "I think
if I work by myself, it would be more efficient. I feel tired to explain everytime I need to
edit soemthing to the essay." She also found it difficult to compose an essay with another
person and explained this difficulty by writing, "Because everytime I need to stop to

explain why I edit this make my thoughts stuck. I prefer to write by myself. " Although

69

she did not report any advantage to writing the essay F2F with another person, she
supposed it would be better than in a CMC environment.

Writing in a CMC environment in task 2 confirmed her earlier suspicions that it
would be more difficult than F2F; however, she found that, "actually discuss on the
computer is not as hard as I thought." She commented that she disliked that she and her
partner were not able to write together but rather had to divide "the part for each other
which is hard to combine and do the cohesion between the different paragraphs we
wrote." Interestingly, she reported thinking that, "if I know what he is going to write and
he know what I am going to write than our paragraph will be much easier to become a
unity."

MC noted both drawbacks and advantages of writing collaboratively online. She
commented on the writing experience and Googledocs tool saying that, "sometimes I did
not saw his message to me immediately" and "the layout function and the
spelling/gramma check function is not as good as word document". Similar to her
responses on the F2F surveys for essay 2 and 3, she continued to feel that, "sometimes it
is kind of a waste of time to explain if your partner disagree with you. It will make you
in hurry while it is timed writing" when she was writing in a CMC context. Her
reactions were not entirely negative, however. She felt strongly that, "It is good practice
for time writing though it keep my heads intense" and "it is fun to convince your parnener
[partner] to accept and agree to use your ideas".

Content of student-talk Much like EU, MC and her partners‘ student talk changed
by environment. In the CMC context, they spent most of their time managing the task

while similar tasks in F 2F found them focusing on generating ideas. In a F2F

7O

environment, MC and her partner did engage in several language-related episodes in
addition to spending a bit more time discussing how the essay would be organized than in
a CMC environment. The focus of their student talk is summarized in Table 10 on the

next page.

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72

As is clearly visible in Table 10 above, coding of MC CMC 4 revealed surprisingly little
exchanges between MC and her partner, SH. Recall that this essay was written as a
homework assignment out-of-class to determine whether students would use the tool
differently when they were not being monitored. A review of the conversation
exchanged in Googledocs is quite telling. MC and SH began their homework by chatting
in Gmail. MC initiated the conversation in Chinese to which SH reminded her that this
was against the rules. SH then suggested using the Googledoc to chat because it was
more efficient. Below in Excerpt 4 is a record of their Googledocs chat, made visible

through the revision history.

 

Excerpt 4

MC CMC 4 Gmail Chat Transcript

 

MC: {flifiigrmfiflfigiflflvIE ‘? [Can you see the characters I have typed?]
SH: we must use english here. [teacher] can see if we chat or not

MC: CALLLLLL ME

SH: now what u wanna writ about?

MC: CALLLLLL ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

MC: call me i will talk to you

SH: on phone ‘?

MC: yes

 

Immediately following MC’s response of “yes,” the entire chat was deleted from the
Googledoc. There were several autosaves in which no revisions were recorded and then,
in the next recorded revision, the pair had already begun to compose the introduction of
their essay. This finding led me to check what the other pairs were doing during their
homework assignment. Of the nine remaining pairs participating in the fourth essay, only

one other did not use a combination of Gmail and/or Googledocs to discuss the essay. It

73

appears that, at least for these students, CMC may have been an obstacle to completing
the task.

While the exact percentages for MC and her partners in a F 2F context differ from
EU's, the general distribution is the same. That is, the focus of both MC and EU seems to
have been the same across the F2F writing tasks. In both tasks, MC spent the most time
generating ideas, followed by LREs, structure, reading, task clarification, and finally task
management (Refer to Table 10). Of note is the extremely large variation for both
environments for MC and her partners.

Effect of planning, collaboration, and peer revising an essay. For MC's first
essay written over the intemet, she and her partner, AA, chatted in Gmail about the essay
for a total of 23 minutes before beginning to compose the essay. Although they were
chatting for a lengthy period of time, they shared relatively few turns. This was due
mostly to the fact that they were already discussing their thesis after only five turns. This
exchange is transcribed below in Excerpt 5. These transcripts show that the pair is
brainstorming together rather than separately, but that this brainstorming is somewhat

dominated by MC.

 

Excerpt 5
Transcripts of MC CMC 2

 

AA: but what do you think the thesis should be?

MC: What about write on the beautiful horse? I got some ideas and examples

AA: cool. now let's brainstorm and we will discuss later

MC: firstly, we need to claim how the authors opinion on it. I think the author didnot
think its not good

AA: why?

MC: the tone and the name of the story shows a beautiful experience

AA: aha and we need a support and example. what about the thesis?

MC: I think the idea of Aram indicate the opion of the author, do u think so?

like everybody think Mourad is crazy, but Aram said he donnot think so

 

74

 

Excerpt 5 (cont’d).

 

and you can look at the P195

the bottom of it\

the paragraph begin with "Well, itseems...

I suggest here indicate the opnion of the author

AA: oh yeah

MC: so, in the essay, we r going to contrast our opinion, which is we think this action is
regarded as stealing, do u think is good?

AA: ok. I will think about good thesis now :)

 

After quickly establishing their thesis, the pair moved in to the Googledocs and began
writing. Although MC wrote that they should move on to the document page where they
could keep brainstorming and writing, once on that page, she proceeds to write the essay.
At no point before beginning to write the essay did the pair divide the task. Rather, MC
began writing the essay and plowed through it. Typing directly into the Googledoc, AA
asked MC to share her ideas with him after she had finished the introductory paragraph
so that he could help more, but MC did not respond to his request for several minutes.
Finally, she indicated that he could "write some on the story" while she would "write
[their] opinion on it first" and then they could both edit and combine the parts. Several
times during the ninety minutes, AA made similar attempts to chat with MC, most of
which were either ignored at length or entirely.

Table 11 below outlines the revisions that AA and MC made to their essay.
Unlike EU and her partner, MC and AA only had one text-based change. Across the
categories, however, the two pairs seem to have been remarkably similar in terms of the
number of revisions (EU total = 31; MC = 41) and the way in which they were made (i.e.,

by one of the partners).

75

 

Table l 1

Peer Revision & Edits MC CMC 2

 

 

 

 

MC AA Pair Total
Instances Words Instances Words Instances Words
Surface Changes
Spelling 0 O O 0 0 0
Tense/num/mod O 0 O 0 O 0
Punctuation 2 0 2 0 4 0
Format 1 l 2 2 3 3
Total 3 1 4 2 7 3
Meaning-Preserving Changes
Additions 1 7 3 8 3 4 20 42
Deletions 7 1 2 1 1 8 1 3
Substitutions 2 2 O O 2 2
Permutations 0 0 O 0 O O
Distributions 0 0 0 O O O
Consolidations l 1 0 O 1 1
Total 27 53 4 5 31 58
Text-based changes
Additions 1 l O 0 0 0
Total 1 1 0 0 1 l

 

Although MC and SH did not spend much time chatting, compared to EU CMC 4,
they made considerable revisions and edits to their essay. These revisions did not include
any text-based changes, but they did include many additions and deletions that improved
the essay's coherence and unity. Table 12 found below summarizes the documented

revisions.

 

Table 12

Peer Revision & Edits MC CMC 4

 

 

MC SH Pair Total
Instances Words Instances Words Instances Words
Surface Changes
Spelling 0 O O O 0 0

 

76

 

Table 12 (cont’d).

 

 

 

 

Tense/num/mod 0 0 0 0 0 0
Punctuation 3 0 0 0 3 0
Format 4 0 l 0 5 0
Meaning-Preserving Changes

Additions 19 21 0 0 19 21
Deletions 5 6 1 l 6 7
Substitutions 2 8 0 0 2 8
Permutations l 0 0 0 1 0
Distributions 1 0 0 0 1 0
Consolidations 2 2 0 0 2 2
Text-based changes

Additions 0 0 0 O 0 0
Deletions 0 0 0 0 0 0
Substitutions 0 0 0 0 0 0
Permutations 0 0 0 0 0 0
Distributions 0 0 0 0 0 0
Consolidations 0 0 0 0 0 0

Holistic score. As seen in Table 13 below, MC received fairly consistent holistic
scores across the environments. Her mean score for CMC was M= 2.25 while her mean
score for F2F was slightly higher at M= 2.63. Total rater agreement on MC's scores was

90.6%.

 

Table 13

MC Holistic Essay Scores by Environment

 

 

 

CMC
MC Essay 2 MC Essay 4 M SD
Rater 1 1.5 2.5
Rater 2 2.5 2.5
M 2 2.5 2.25 0.35
% Rater agree 75 100
F2F
MC Essay 1 MC Essay 3
Rater 1 2.5 2.5

 

77

 

Table 13 (cont’d)

 

Rater 2 2.5 3
M 2.5 2.75 2.63 0.18
% Rater agree 100 87.5

 

Environment: CMC versus F 2F

As previously discussed and as is visible in Table 14 below, the content of student
talk varied for students depending on the task environment. A 2-tailed independent t-test
reveals that these differences are significant. The case-study participants, on average
spent more time generating ideas in a F 2F environment (M= 50.9, SE= 6.39) than they
did in a CMC environment (M= 18.31, SE = 6.21). This difference was significant t(6) =
3.66, p= 0.011). Cohen's d = 0.38 indicates this significance has a medium effect size on
the population. On average, these participants also spent more time exchanging LREs
(M= 18.97, SE= 3.47) in F 2F than CMC (M= 0.76, SE= .76) which was also significant
t(6) = 5.13, p= 0.002 with a medium effect size (Cohen's d =0.32). Finally, these
participants tended to spend more time on average discussing organization (M= 13.69,
SE= 1.66) when F2F than when collaborating online (M= 1.59, SE= 1.08) which was
significant t(6) = 6.11, p= 0.001). Cohen's d for organization indicated a smaller effect
size d= 0.28. On the other hand, case-study participants spent more time on average
managing the time in a CMC context (M= 62.04, SE= 4.61) than when sitting next to
their partner (M= 5.6, SE= 0.84) which was also significant t(3.l99)= -12.03, p= 0.001)
with a small effect size of d=0.16. While it is true that students, on average, spent more
time clarifying the task in a CMC environment (M= 17.3, SE= 6.53) than in F2F (M=

2.01, SE= 1.29) this difference was not significant t(3.235) = -2.298, p= 0.099.

78

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79

Quality of end products
The third research question asked whether the task environment had any apparent
effect on the quality of the end product. In order to answer this question two raters gave

holistic grades on the eight student essays. The scores are listed in Table 15 below.

 

Table 15

Holistic Ratings and Percent Rater Agreement

 

 

 

CMC
EU Essay 1 EU Essay 4 MC Essay 2 MC Essay 4
Rater 1 3 2 1.5 2.5
Rater 2 2.5 2 2.5 2.5
M 2.75 2 2 2.5
% Rater agree 87.5 100 75 100
F 2F
EU Essay 2 EU Essay 3 MC Essay 1 MC Essay 3
Rater 1 3 3.5 2.5 2.5
Rater2 2.5 3.5 2.5 3
M 2.75 3.5 2.5 2.75
% Rater agree 87.5 100 100 87.5
Total % rater
agree 92.2

 

These essays were graded based on the holistic rubric developed by the teacher. The
grades are reported on a 4.0 scale (with 2.5 being a passing grade). Percent rater
agreement was determined by dividing the 4.0 scale on the grade intervals of 0.5. This
interval was chosen because it was the standard grade interval used in the class and the
language center for reporting of all grades. Dividing 100% (total agreement possible) by
the possible intervals (eight) resulted in a 12.5% agreement for each 0.5 grade interval.
In other words, raters both giving a 3.0 score would have 100% agreement whereas two

ratings of 2.5 and 3.0 would only have a percent agreement of 87.5%. A calculation of
80

mean rater agreement for all 8 essays revealed a high rater agreement of 92.2% (Refer to
Table 15 above).

Raw scores (Table 15 above) indicated that while MC’s performance across tasks
remained fairly consistent, EU’s performance did not remain as stable. This could be
because of the great variance in collaboration with each of the partners. Both raters
agreed that the essay produced by EU and her partner in task 3 was of a higher quality
than any of her other 3 essays. Table 16 below shows the mean essay scores by
environment. An independent t-test revealed that, on average, EU and MC received
higher holistic ratings in a F2F environment (M = 2.87, SE = 0.22) than in a CMC
environment (M = 2.31, SE = 0.19). This difference, however, was not significant t(6) =

1.96, p = 0.097.

 

Table 16

Mean Holistic Scores by Environment

 

 

M SD P-value Cohen's d
CMC 2.31 0.38 0.097 1.6
F 2F 2.87 0.43

 

Summary

In summary, survey responses indicated that students were generally neutral to the
task and the environment. Students noted some benefits as well as challenges to both the
collaborative writing task itself and the use of the new tool, Googledocs. Content of the
case-studies' student talk varied by context, although it seems that there was variation
across pairs as to how, exactly, the conversations were framed. Similarly, these pairs
varied in how they decided to work together, whether attempting to participate in a

collaborative or cooperative effort. In the CMC environment, cooperation seemed to be

81

the norm for the case-study participants; in the F2F environment, the type of
collaboration varied depending on the individuals in the group. Overall, it appears that
case-study participants in the F2F environment tended to spend more time revising each
other's ideas and sentences, in the form of oral reformulations. Students in the CMC
environment made fewer changes to their partner's section of the essay with some groups
choosing to make virtually no edits at all and other groups displaying unequal editing
behaviors between partners. Although differences in holistic grades were noticed in the
data subset (indicating some environmental effects on the overall quality of the essay in

favor of a F2F context), no significant differences were found.

82

CHAPTER FIVE
CONCLUSION, IMPLICATIONS, & FUTURE RESEARCH

In the attempt to tease out the transferability of Googledocs as a CSCL, the
present study addressed four research questions investigating the writing processes of
students using the word processing interface in two different task environments, face-to-
face and synchronous computer-mediated communication. This investigation included
an overview of all participants' perceptions of the tasks and an in-depth look at the nature
of two case-study participants' collaboration and how that collaboration functioned within
both task environments. It also examined the quality of the final products created. This
study’s findings shed some light on the potential application of a hitherto unexamined
intemet communication tool (ICT) as a computer supported collaborative learning
(CSCL) tool for the second and/or foreign language classroom.

Transferability of Googledocs as a CSCL

In accordance with the interactionist vein of SLA, a successful computer-
supported collaborative learning tool would ideally facilitate collaborative interaction,
either in the form of providing opportunities for input, output, and language negotiation
(cognitive interactionism) or for scaffolding (sociocultural interactionism). If not
facilitating these, a CSCL ought to, at the very least, make such interactions possible.
The four current research questions attempt to tap into the interactions facilitated and/or
made possible with Googledocs.

CMC Googledocs: A Truly Collaborative T 001 ?

Although attempts were made to promote negotiation with closed-ended tasks

(Blake, 2000; Pellettieri, 2000) and discussion with “text-responsible” prompts (Leki &

Carson, 1997), there was little evidence to support the contention that students engaged in

83

significant or meaningful interaction in the CMC environment as compared to the F 2F
environment. In fact, mean responses fi'om the survey indicated that students noted less
conflict on average while interacting in the CMC tasks (M= 2.09, SE= 0.21) than in the
F2F (M= 2.36, SE= 0.29) although neither environment reported an overly disruptive
conflict. Previous literature would therefore imply that none of these students were
engaged in significant negotiations over the text. However, the student's open-ended
questions might point to quite the opposite. The majority of the students noted some
level of discussion of the topics, whether the source of the discussion being from a point
of agreement or disagreement. What weight should be lent these answers remains
questionable since students were well aware that they were being graded on their level of
participation in the activities. Whether or not the students were interacting with each
other by scrolling up and down and re-reading their partner’s composition cannot be
known because of the lack of screen captures and eye-tracker information.

In terms of the content of student talk, the actions of the F2F student pairs were
congruent with previous research. Although the precise percentage of time spent on
generating ideas differed across student pairs, this category accounted for the largest total
time for each pair. The average time spent on generating ideas across the four F2F essays
was 50.8%, remarkably similar to the 53% Storch (2005) noted. The second largest
category, language related episodes, was also in-line with previous studies (Storch, 2005;
Cummings, 1989 as referenced in Storch, 2005).

Irrespective of student-reports, chat transcripts and Googledocs revisions of the
case-study participants (if assumed to be somewhat representative of the rest of the class)

tentatively suggest that there was minimal interaction between students in the CMC

84

 

environment as opposed to the F 2F. With a few noted exceptions (e. g. the pairs in task 4
that chatted to exchange ideas throughout the writing process), student interaction tended
to be reserved for the beginning and the end of the writing task and then, when it
occurred, did not offer much in the way of language negotiation (LREs) or scaffolding as
visible through Table 9 and Table 12 detailing the content of student talk in the CMC
environments. Unlike the F2F groups, these student pairs spent most of their chatting
time in dividing the task. That is, they quickly established their thesis without fleshing
out how it would be developed and supported before delegating tasks and beginning to
write; they merely began writing with a backbone of the task in mind. The development
and support for the delegated parts were left up to the individual student. While certainly
more frequent in the CMC setting, it is necessary to note that several F2F pairs also spent
time brainstorming and/or writing independently.

Student surveys report that one difficult aspect of the CMC environment was that
it required them to explain themselves, certainly not an easy task. Both EU and MC
reported difficulties in negotiating their thoughts regardless of the task environment,
though they certainly noted that the "lean" medium (Smith, et. a1, 2003, p. 706) afforded
by the CMC world was the more difficult of the two. The students’ accounts that the
CMC environments were more difficult may indicate that there is a greater potential for
learning precisely because it forced the students to negotiate without the aid of non-
verbal cues like gestures. EU noted her lack of typing skills as a source of frustration,
while MC considered writing with another person her major source of frustration. MC
reported thinking it was boring, inefficient, and difficult to write with another person.

Oddly enough, neither student's claim of significant negotiation can be corroborated in

85

the chat transcripts. In fact, there was relatively little negotiation of the text or the
individual writer's Opinion. This lack of engagement in discussing the meaning and their
interpretation of the text can be contrasted with the discussions that students engaged in
during the F2F tasks. But, even if there had been substantial communication, there is no
indication that these students would have appreciated the task any more.

It seems that, for the CMC environment at least, merely making text-responsible
writing prompts will not suffice to ensure that students will take advantage of the
opportunity to interact with each other to discuss the text (as indicated by Leki & Carson,
1997). This is not to say that such negotiations are impossible; certainly they are quite
possible with the chatting technology currently available. However, mere availability
does not imply that students will take advantage of the situation, especially when the task
has a pre-determined endpoint that may foster impatience with the task and the benefits it
may offer. Kessler and Bikowski (2010) have remarked that,

collaboration leads to a sense of ownership that encourages extensive utilization

of the learning space. . . students begin to use the space in ways that are

meaningful to them but unanticipated by instructors or designers. Of course,
some students may not immediately recognize the potential of these spaces and

the interaction that they offer. (p. 55)

This seems to be precisely the case, especially when noting student comments that
writing online was "uncomfortable" (EU CMC essay 1) or difficult because he/she had to
explain his/her thoughts rather than being able to express them non-verbally in a F2F

pair. Psychologically, we all seem resistant to those very things that will improve us.

86

Both SE and EU think that the chatting online is more difficult because they are
forced to articulate their ideas, yet they both seem to experience similar difficulty when
they enter the F2F environment. Furthermore, what they identify as being most difficult
about writing with another person is exactly what the research has shown to be beneficial
to students. That is, the more opportunities students have to interact in meaningful ways,
the better it is for their language development. What has been considered meaningful is
an interaction that requires more than a few word response (Swain & Lapkin, 1998) such
as text-responsible discussions where students are prompted to discuss and defend their
interpretations of an authentic text (Leki & Carson, 1997) or topics that instigate conflict
and thus the defense of one's opinions (Dale, 1994). Perhaps students would have been
more amenable to the new environment had they felt like it were more similar to F2F
meetings (i.e., seemingly more natural to them). For example, if the students had been
using the voice and/or video chat features now available on Gmail instead of the thin
medium of the text-only chat.

This is not to say that there was no collaborative writing. Towards the end of the
assigned time, most pairs engaged in peer-revising and editing. This stage usually
involved some surface-level changes, and review of the finished product revealed many
morphosyntactic errors that went unaddressed. Previous literature supports this lack of
attention to form of students in a CMC environment (Arnold, Ducate, & Kost, 2009;
Kessler, 2009). It remains to be seen whether most of the students reacted as AL (EU’s
partner in CMC essay 1) and SH (MC's partner in CMC essay 4) who both indicated
noticing sections of their partner's writing riddled with morphosyntactic errors and/or

unclear ideas. AL stated that the point when "you tried to look at the other part of the

87

essay which is write by your partner, there are lots of grammar errors and some sentences
doesn't make sense" was "the most difficult part" of the collaborative task.

What is interesting here is that neither AL nor SH followed up their confusion
with a negotiation, either in the chat window or the Googledoc. While it is not
particularly surprising that students did not report experiencing any of the benefits of
saving face or reduced affective factors normally associated with an anonymous CMC
technology, it is surprising that students did not resolve their confusion for the sake of
their grade. Of course, the lack of resolving conflict is not unheard of in the CALL
world. The text-medium and the ability to scroll up and down might make a verbalized
resolution unnecessary (e.g., Smith, 2008). One would imagine that students, conscious
of the fact that they would be graded on the intelligibility of their partner's work, would
be motivated to produce the clearest essay possible. Such lack of negotiation suggests a
lack of co-ownership of the essay. Arnold, Ducate, and Kost (2009) similarly found that
students working collaboratively on a wiki did not exhibit a sense of co-ownership of the
wiki pages because they never engaged in deletions to another's work.

Student questionnaire responses raise other possible reasons for this lack of
revision to a peer's work. One student reported the desire to stop and help her partner get
back on track, but this would have been an interruption. She wrote, "I wish then I cannot
writing myself and meantime know what my partner's writing, so that I can't immediately
tell my partner like 'this sentences are not good, or did not support very well,‘ but if I do
it, I feel will interrupt my mind to write" (KA, CMC essay 1). So, we return to the idea
of efficiency. Pausing during the writing process to comment on a peer's work is

inefficient because it disrupts the creative flow; and, in a timed, graded situation, this is

88

less than ideal. In this sense the CMC environment, specifically because it makes it
possible to ignore a partner, may be better suited to getting out a drafi of an essay. Such
was the case for several students who wrote that the CMC environment mitigated the
effects of the interruptions because it allowed them to ignore the chatting of their partner
(a fact they thought to be negative, however). "Sometime I did not saw his message to
me immediately" (MC, CMC essay 2).

It should be noted, however, that the Googledoc revisions attest to the fact that
usually at least 1 student in each pair took responsibility for attending to revisions in both
sections of the essay. Although these revisions included some morphosytactic
corrections, when made, most of these revisions were meaning-preserving additions and
substitutions that added to the piece's overall cohesion. The case-study pairs' revision
behaviors supported previous findings on the revision behaviors of wikis (Arnold,
Ducate, & Kost, 2009; Mak & Coniam, 2008). Of the case-study pairs, only 2 surveys
failed to mention some concern about connecting the two parts of the essay. Many of the
students noted that this was one of the more difficult aspects of the collaborative task,
especially in the CMC environment where the two sections might have drifted away from
the agreed upon thesis.

Although these revision behaviors were certainly less frequent than was hoped
for, their presence during the writing process may still be promising. Recall that Dale
(1994) claimed that viewing another person's cognitive processes unfold was helpful in
furthering a students' own cognitive abilities and that Googledocs, as a synchronous tool,
allows students to view their peer's writing evolve in real time. In this light, whether or

not a revision was to a student's own work or to the work of his/her peer, the possibility

89

that his/her peer could witness these changes still exists. That is, by watching
Googledocs, one peer is privvy to the cognitive processes of his/her peer. Unfortunately,
from the current data, only a few students reported noticing the skills of their partners.
AA (MC's partner in CMC essay 2) wrote, "My partner's writing is very impressive and I
liked the way she writes and she is fast and have a great ideas and supports." MC wrote
that with Googledocs "it will be easier if my partner can see every time I edit and tell me
his idea immediately." Several student comments about the difficulty to see the partner's
edits and/or chats throws into doubt whether students were able to notice and/or actually
did notice their peer's writing iterations.

While pinpointing the precise source of the relative lack of interaction from the
current data is a fairly impossible task, there are several possible explanations for this
phenomenon. The first lies in how students tend to task themselves during writing
sessions. It almost goes without saying that because the context was a timed and graded
writing assignment, students would attempt to find the most expeditious way to complete
the required task while exerting the least possible effort. Previous research conducted by
Kessler and Bikowski (2010) perfectly illustrates this fact. In a semester-long wiki study,
student participation fell into several categories, the largest of which accounted for a
slight majority of students: these students "engaged marginally" in the activity (p. 46).
Only a very few students engaged beyond the assignment's minimal requirements.

This operational axiom was most likely compounded by the nature of the medium
and the task themselves; the question then becomes to what extent is this true? Recall
that Googledocs is an interface that allows for a division of labor because it is, by nature,

a synchronous collaborative tool. It would make little sense, then, to use a tool built

90

specifically to increase efficiency in the inefficient manner of working together through
each stage of the writing process. Previous research on wikis reflects this perspective on
the medium as efficient (Arnold, Ducate, & Kost, 2009). Storch's (2005) research on F 2F
collaborative writing reported similar student perceptions of a collaborative writing task
as being more efficient than working alone.

Similarly, the results could be a result of how students task themselves in a timed—
writing situation. The case-study participants and their partners mentioned time on a
number of occasions, a fact that speaks to effect time might have had. These comments
ranged from gentle reminders of the time to demands that their peers hurry up. The time-
consciousness (or even anxiety) probably prompted students to be as efficient as possible
in order to get the assignment done. Time, in combination with the fact that students
generally perceived the CMC task to be more difficult, could have created a significant
cognitive and affective load for the students.

It is interesting that students generally interacted in this manner. It seems that
students were able to envision just one possible way to accomplish the writing task.
Perhaps this is an artifact of the medium in the sense that division of labor is possible in a
CMC environment, but not so much in a F2F one. However, student responses from
surveys indicated that students in a F2F environment also ended up dividing some of the
tasks, such as brainstorming and editing. Another explanation could be what Arnold,
Ducate, and Kost (2009) found in a collaborative wiki project: that students did not
display qualities of equal ownership of the collaborative document (i.e., once students
wrote part of the wiki, other students left it alone). These behaviors often resulted in

repetitive sections, rather than co-owned consolidated topics. Student responses in the

91

current study lend merit to this possibility. Several students mentioned noticing errors or
non-unified parts of their partner’s section, but they chose to leave these parts alone.

Another probable cause for the division of labor and lack of collaboration was the
context of the assignment. The class was well-practiced in discussing literature in
literature circles. This type of student-led discussion requires that each student be
responsible for a certain aspect of the discussion whether that be content or lexical. Thus,
students might very well have thought that this was the type of collaboration that was
expected of them.

The effect of focusing on the division of task in conjunction with the lack of co-

 

generating of ideas meant that essays were less cohesive and unified than in the F2F
environment, although it is promising that students report noticing this deficiency in their
own writing. In this sense, CMC environment might be beneficial as it might have
helped students to conceptualize what, exactly, an essay lacking unity would look like.
Thus, by participating intimately in the writing process with another person, students
were able to step outside of their own writing in order to visualize the need for unity--a
concept not easily grasped by many L2 learners. Kessler and Bikowski (2010) have
echoed a similar lack of synthesis and cohesion in student-led collaborative writing.
Pedagogical Implications ofGoogledocs

The nature of the interactions in this CMC context raises a unique set of
opportunities and challenges that educators ought to ponder when considering
implementing Googledocs in the classroom. Though tentative at best, these data suggest
an underwhelming response to the tool. Perhaps student reactions were lukewarm

because the writing assignments were graded requirements for the course. As often

92

seems the case, grades tend to make otherwise new and interesting activities seem like
drudgery. Or, perhaps the tool did not feel at all new or exciting simply because it so
closely resembled Microsoft Word. Thus, students who did not buy into my claim that
chatting online to compose an essay was fun or, at the very least, helpful for promoting
language development, did not even have the novelty of a new tool to excite them. This
is in stark contrast with a slew of CMC research where students are ofien engaging in
ways that do feel novel, and therefore, exciting to them (e.g., wikis in Arnold et al.,
2009). Additionally, unlike many authentic uses of CMC tools like blogs and wiki,
learners in this study were not writing for a real audience. This is, perhaps, an
inauthentic use of the tool which could explain why students did not seemed enthused
about its incorporation into the course’s syllabus.

More than being uninteresting, MC's survey responses provide further explanation
that some students might have been viewed Googledocs as an inferior tool. MC
mentioned that some of the word processing abilities, namely, the spell and grammar
check, and the formatting of the deceptively large text block were not as accurate or easy
to use as Microsoft Word. While she expressed some fi'ustration at this, she also
mentioned that it was a good test for her abilities because the crutches she normally relied
on, were not as refined in Googledocs. Other students, however, were not so amenable to
being forced to relinquish their much-loved scaffolds. SE (EU's partner, CMC essay 2),
for example, complained that the writing task was impossible because she couldn't use a
dictionary. Furthermore, some students were resistant to the perceived difficulty of the

task. Because the current data indicate that students are resistant to such work, regardless

93

of the task environment, language instructors need to make it clear to students that,
though difficult, it is precisely the struggle that will further their language development.

Language instructors may also find themselves wondering what benefits lay in the
integration of Googledocs, since little evidence has been given to support claims that it
promotes substantial peer interaction. As previously stated, some students might be
attuned to the actions of their partner and may, thus, learn simply by observing what
linguistic moves a more skilled learner makes when revising the essay. Additionally,
analysis showed that CMC pairs allotted more than half of the student talk-time to task
management (M= 62.04%). Excerpts examined above indicate that pairs engaged in
extensive task management before dividing the tasks of writing the essay. While may not
offer learners any ostensible benefits, significant task clarification in the form of text may
have been partly responsible for the longer texts produced by the CMC pairs. Unlike
previous wiki literature (Arnold et al., 2009), the delegation of tasks in Googledocs made
it possible for students to work together on one piece of writing without the negative
interferences of self-elected leaders as noted in the F2F pairs. Also of note in the CMC
environment is that students might be more likely to articulate their thoughts about the
prompt and do so in English because they are acutely aware of the teacher’s presence in
the CMC space. Out of all of the student groups, it appears that only one CMC pair
relied on its L1 (MC & SH CMC essay 4) while several F 2F pairs spent at least some
time code-switching (e. g. MC & LA F2F essay 1; EU & CH F2F essay 2).

It seems that Googledocs in a CMC environment, tended towards fostering
creativity. Essays for both case-studies written over the intemet had higher word count

(M=689 words), on average, than when in the F2F environment (M= 570 words). This

94

higher number reinforces the claim that students were more freely writing in their own
sections of the essay than the monitored compositions of the F 2F groups. However,
while students in the CMC context tended to foster rather than stifle creativity, this was
certainly not fool-safe. The "free-rider effect" that frustrated SE in F 2F essay 2 did not
disappear in the CMC environment (Johnson & Johnson, 1994 as referenced in Arnold et
al., 2009). Although it was perhaps less conspicuous, MC still mentioned in her last
survey (for essay 4) that her partner in essay 2 had, after ninety-minutes, contributed a
mere sentence or two. This free-rider effect negatively affected the group dynamic in
both tasks, but perhaps more so in a F 2F environment where it was more difficult to hide
a lack of input.

It has been my experience that students struggle with cohesion and unity in their
own writing. Whereas they can easily‘identify techniques of cohesion and lack of unity
in textbook exercises, they have difficulty putting their receptive knowledge to
productive use. Perhaps, then, Googledocs could serve as a classroom too] where
students' awareness is raised thereby drawing their attention to the need for cohesive
devices. If this CMC exchange were the first in a series of writing sessions, then
Googledocs would present a potential opportunity for such experiential learning. These
latter discussions could be carried out F2F or in the CMC environment, employing the
chat features of Gmail. Perhaps students would, after these initial individual
contributions noted in the current research, participate more collaboratively in later
writing sessions, as Kessler and Bikowski (2010) observed in their participants' creation

of a semester-long wiki.

95

Such group work might function to benefit the whole, a necessary but ofien absent
component of most writing groups that participate in peer review; that is, in a traditional
peer review group, the individual has composed a piece that is then workshopped, not for
the benefit of the group but for the benefit of the individual's work (Carson & Nelson
(1994). Unlike this, the Googledoc has been a result of (at the very least) cooperation. If
it then undergoes multiple drafts and peer reviews by the members of the original group,
students may feel a greater sense of ownership, benefit, and investment. F
Summary and Future Research.

If teachers intend to use Googledocs in the classroom as a synchronous

 

collaborative tool, they ought to prepare themselves for possibility that learners might

l!

engage in cooperation rather than collaboration (Haythomthwaite, 2006). While
cooperation is not negative in itself, the type witnessed in the current research revealed
minimal amounts of surface-level interaction. Student commentary on the difficulty of
seeing their peer’s writing, chatting, and edits make it hard to claim that students are
observing and/or benefitting from observing the writing process of their peers. Although
the findings are certainly tentative, there is little evidence to support the integration of
Googledocs as a computer supported collaborative learning tool, either from a cognitive
or sociocultural standpoint. The use of an eye-tracker in conjunction with Googledoc
revision history might prove useful in fully understanding whether or not students are
noticing the linguistic moves their partners make.

Perhaps the true value of the Googledocs, however may lie in its ability to
facilitate efficient division of labor in peer groups thereby functioning as a production

tool whose product could be used in later collaborations. A telling follow-up study

96

would be to have students participate in Googledocs as an ungraded, untirned assignment
that was explicitly linked to other course assignments. One possibility might be to have
students work together as they did in the current study. After each pair created a draft,
they could work together (either in F2F or CMC) to revise the draft further, focusing on
development of ideas and cohesion/unity. That is, teachers could exploit Googledocs for
its benefits of efficiency and use it as the starting point for a collaboratively written
multi-draft essay. It would be interesting to see whether students would respond well to
collaborative work in a long-term assignment where they were equally invested in the
assignment (Carson & Nelson, 1994) as well as to see if the multiple-iterations approach
would result in an evolution of the collaborative process, as Arnold, Ducate, Lomicka,
and Lord (2009) found in their study of a semester-long class wiki.

Another study that would shed light on Googledocs would be to look carefully at
the few groups who chatted throughout the task; that is, the students who might have
truly collaborated using Googledocs as their interface. A better grasp of these
interactions may prove useful in grasping what teachers can do to promote collaboration
in the language classroom.

Limitations

Although the current study does offer some insight into how students engage in a
collaborative writing task while using the Googledocs interface, it has numerous
limitations that need to be acknowledged. First, because it was a qualitative study, one
must take care in generalizing the results to a wider population. Second, as already
noted, although an attempt has been made to nest this research in an understandable

context, these data come from a few individual writing tasks of a small sample of

97

convenience. Any claims of generalizability were significantly reduced when the plan
for counterbalancing the tasks was made impossible. And, while an attempt was made to
seek second ratings on the holistic essays, the remainder of the coded data did not get
second-rated. Furthermore, recreating the essay construction in Googledocs made for a
particularly time consuming task such that a widespread analysis of many students
proved impossible. Internal validity may have been compromised as the researcher was
also the teacher and, at times, the needs of the students overrode experimental concerns.
Finally, external validity may have been compromised by the timed nature of the writing

activity.

98

-“""_-"“="-—n

APPENDIX

99

 

’1'» ..w a...” .
I

APPENDIX A

Appendix A. Holistic rubric for essays

 

CONTENT

Teacher Comments

 

DEVELOPMENT

ORGANIZATION

LANGUAGE

Address the prompt
Shows understanding of and reflection on
the story?

Specific examples and/or details from the
text

Explain how examples and/or details are
relevant

Logical

Ideas are clear and easy to understand
Coherence & Unity (in sentence, between
sentence, between paragraphs)

Vocabulary
Grammar

 

100

 

APPENDIX B

Appendix B. Survey for Task 1 -3

 

1. Self and Partner-Assessment

1.) I believe that my group participation grade for today is (circle one):

1.0 (bad/needs LOT of improvement)

3.0 (good enough to get a good grade)

2.) I believe this to be true because . . . (Explain)

2.0 (needs some improvement)

4.0 (excellent—it was the best)

3.) Today, I believe that MY PARTNER’S participation grade for today is (circle one):

1.0 (bad/needs LOT of improvement)

3.0 (good enough to get a good grade)

5.) I believe this to be true because . . . (Explain)

11. Activity Assessment

2.0 (needs some improvement)

4.0 (excellent—it was the best)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Strongly Somewhat Neutral Somewhat Strongly
Disagree Disagree Agree Agree
1. It was difficult because 1 2 3 4 5
my partner and I couldn’t
agree.
2. I loved this activity. 1 2 3 4 5
3. I thought this 1 2 3 4 5

 

 

 

101

assignment was fun.

 

4. I think that writing 1 2 3 4 5
with another person is
good language practice.

 

5. I liked sitting next to 1 2 3 4 5
my
partner and working.

 

6. I would like to do more 1 2 3 4 5
in-class assignments like
this one.

 

7. I had a hard time 1 2 3 4 5
writing this essay because
we had to use a
computer. I

would have done a better
job if it were hand-

 

 

written.

8. I feel like I learned 1 2 3 4 5
something today.

9. I liked using Google 1 2 3 4 5
Documents

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

to compose my essay.

 

III. Short answer:

1. Was it easy to communicate with your partner? If yes, why? If no, why not?

2. While working on the essay, what were you thinking and feeling?

3. What did you write about? Did you find it difficult to decide how to write the essay?

102

4. If you found it difficult, what made it difficult?
5. Describe the writing process. What did you find easy? Hard?

6. What do you think about communicating with your partner this way?

7. Would you want to do more similar activities? Why or why not?

8. In the future, would you prefer to write with the same tools as you used today? Why
or why not?

103

APPENDIX C

Sample Prompt (Essay 1)

Based on your reading, reflections, class work, and discussions about Chopin’s “Story of
An Hour” and Collier’s “The Chaser,” work together with your partner to write an essay
on the following topic:

The portrayal of love in each story is different. Describe how the author portrays love in
each story. Use examples from the stories to support your claim. Then, compare/contrast
it to your own beliefs, thoughts, and/or feelings on what love should be. Use personal
experience (illustrations and anecdotes) to support and explain your beliefs. As always,
remember to be clear and concise in your ideas.

Good Luck!

Sample Prompt (Essay 2)

Based on your reading, reflections, class work, and discussions about Saroyan's "A
Beautiful White Horse" OR Jackson’s “The Lottery” work together with your partner to
write an essay on morality.

Describe how the author defines morality and what conclusion he/she comes to about the
actions of his/her characters (i.e. were the character’s actions moral in the author’s
opinion?) Use examples from the story to support your claim. Then, compare/contrast it
to your own beliefs, thoughts, and/or feelings on whether or not the character’s actions
were moral. Use personal experience (illustrations and anecdotes) as well as class
discussion and any outside knowledge you may have to support and explain your beliefs.
As always, remember to be clear and concise in your ideas.

Good Luck!

104

APPENDIX D

 

 

 

DISCUSSION DIRECTOR
Name

Group

Book

Assignment pages _ to _

You are the discussion director. Your job is to write down some good questions that
you think your group will want to talk about. This is NOT a quizll Your task is to help
your group discuss the big ideas of the reading (book, article, passage or poem). Usually
the best discussion topics come from your thoughts, feelings and questions as you read.

Possible discussion questions or topics for today:

 

 

 

 

 

How...
If...

Some general questions to start a discussion:

What did you think about this section?

Can someone summarize briefly?

Were you surprised by anything in this section?

What questions do you have after reading this section?
What is one important idea for you from this section?

 

During the discussion, make sure everyone has an equal chance to speak!
Today I called upon the following people to share their ideas:
Word Finder Passage Picker Connector

 

 

 

105

(SAMPLE) Other Responsibilities

1. Word Finding: Look for and write down at least two special words in the
reading. Look for words that are new, different, strange, funny, interesting,
important, difficult, or dialectal. Be prepared to share these with the group when
the Word Finder asks you.

Word Page Why I picked this word

 

 

 

 

 

 

2. Passage Picking: Find and choose one or two parts of the story that you want to
read aloud to the group. Look for passages that may be funny, good, scary, sad,
interesting, descriptive, surprising, or important. Be prepared to share these with
the group when the Passage Picker asks you.

Page Paragraph Why I liked this passage

 

 

 

 

 

3. Connecting: Find a connection between the reading and other readings and the
outside world. Connect the reading to your own life, happenings, similar events,
other people or problems, other stories or books you've read, etc. Be prepared to
share this with the group when the Connector asks you.

"Something today's reading reminded me of was . . . '

106

WORD FINDER

Name

 

Group

 

Book Assignment pages to

 

 

You are the Word Finder. Your job is to look for special words in the reading. Look for
words that are:

0 new interesting
0 different important
0 strange difficult

0 funny dialectal

When you find a word that you want to talk about, mark it with a post-it note or write it
down here:

Word Page Why I picked this word

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When your group meets, help your friends talk about the words you have chosen. Some
ideas you can discuss:

How does this word fit into the passage? How important is it to the passage?

Does anyone know what this word means? Shall we look it up in the dictionary?

How do you use this word? Does anyone know other forms of this word —that is related
forms?

What do you feel when you read, hear or see this word? Can you draw this word?

107

 

PASSAGE PICKER

Name

 

Group

 

Book Assignment pages _

 

You are the Passage Picker: Your job is to find and choose or pick parts of the story that
you want to read aloud to your group, or want your group to think about. These passages
may be:

a good part an interesting part a.
a funny part some good writing 5 .
a scary part a good description ‘ i
a sad part something surprising or important L

Be sure to mark the parts you want to share with a post-it note or bookmark. You
may also write down the page and paragraph numbers. In either case, make a
note to yourself here WHY you liked it.

i

Parts to read out loud:

Page Paragraph Why I liked it

 

 

 

 

You may also ask someone else to read one of your passages aloud, and then you could
ask the rest of the group why THEY THINK you chose that passage!

108

CONNECTOR

Name

 

Group

 

Book Assignment pages to

 

 

You are the Connector. Your job is to find connections between the reading you are
assigned to discuss and other readings and the outside world. This means connecting the
reading to: -

your own life .
happenings at school or locally :
similar events in other places and at other times L

other people or problems
other books, stories or articles ' l
other writings on the same topic

other writings by the same author

Below, write some notes to remind yourself, “Some things today’s reading reminded me
of were. . .”

109

Reporter Date

 

Name
Group

 

 

Book Assignment pages to

 

 

You are the REPORTER. Your job is to take DETAILED notes on the entire
discussion and to write a report of the accomplishments of the group that week.
You will hand this in the following Monday. The report should carefully describe
what your group talked about, the vocabulary you discussed and learned, the
passages you read together, the connections you made, etc. The group may work
on this at the end of group time. The report should be a minimum of 1.5 pages
typed and double-spaced. The GROUP will receive a grade for the report each
week.

110

APPENDIX E

 

Name:

 

Collaborative Writing Assignment 1: Directions

A. This is a 1-hour 30-minute timed writing. You and your partner will work together to
write this essay. Each of you will have your own computer, and you will be sharing the
same Google Document on the Internet. To communicate with each other, you will use
the GMAIL chat program in your email. As you begin this task, remember what we have
discussed about the three steps of the writing process: pre-writing, writing, and
proofreading. Your teacher will announce these to help keep you on track.

B. You now need to log-in to your GMAIL account. To do this, follow the instructions
below:

1. Go to www.gmail.com
2. Sign in to the Gmail account:

USERNAME:
PASSWORD:

 

 

3. Check your email “Inbox” for an email from cazarmosca82@gmail called
“Assignment 1”

4. Click on the email.
5. Click on the blue link.
6. Your Google Document is now open. Type your CHAT name at the top of the

page.
Your CHAT NAME:

 

7. Minimize the Google Document and Maximize your email. Find your partner
in the “Chat” box on the left of your email.
Your PARTNER’S CHAT NAME:

 

8. Click on your partner’s name to open a chat box.

C. During the writing time, you should have out copies of the short stories and any notes.
Your instructor will hand out writing prompts. Keep the prompts face down until you are

111

instructed to turn them over. Once instructed, turn over your sheets, and begin pre-
writing with your partner using Gmail Chat.

D. After you have finished brainstorming, the two of you should begin writing your
essay. Remember that both of you will be typing into the same document, so you will see
what your partner is writing. BUT, in order to show your partner what you are writing,
you must push the “SAVE” button. You should save your work every couple of minutes.
Remember to WORK TOGETHER to compose the essay as I will be able to see what
both of you write as well as the final product.

E. When time is called, save your document once more and then log out. I will print off
your document and grade it for you.

112

APPENDIX F

 

Name:

 

Collaborative Writing Assignment 1: Directions

A. This is a l-hour 30-minute timed writing. You and your partner will work together
to write this essay. You and your partner will be sitting next to each other and sharing a
computer Google Document on the Internet. You should talk just as you would in class.
As you begin this task, remember what we have discussed about the three steps of the
writing process: pre-writing, writing, and proofreading. Your teacher will announce
times to help keep you on track.

B. You now need to log-in to your GMAIL account. To do this, follow the instructions
below:

1.. Go to www.gmail.com
2. Sign in to the Gmail account:

USERNAME:
PASSWORD:

 

 

3. Check your email “Inbox” for an email from cazarmosca82@gmail called
“Assignment 1”

4. Click on the email.

5. Click on the blue link.

6. Your Google Document is now open. Type you and your partner’s name at the
top of the page.

C. During the writing time, you should have out copies of the short stories and any notes.
Your instructor will hand out writing prompts. Keep the prompts face down until you are
instructed to turn them over. Once instructed, turn over your sheets, and begin pre-
writing with your partner. You may use the scrap paper provided.

D. After you have finished brainstorming, the two of you should begin writing your
essay. Remember that both of you will be typing into the same document. You should
save your work every couple of minutes. Remember to WORK TOGETHER to compose
the essay.

113

E. When time is called, save your document once more and then log out. I will print off
your document and grade it for you.

YOU SHOULD WRITE AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, AS WELL AS YOU CAN!
GOOD LUCK!

YOU NOW SHOULD TURN ON YOUR VOICE RECORDER BY PUSHING
“RECORD” AND BEGIN PRE-WRITING OUT LOUD.

114

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115

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