Feedback and writing development through collaboration: A socio-cultural approach

Abstract

While writing is generally considered to be a cognitive activity, collaborative writing incorporates both cognitive and social elements into the activity. Collaborative activities can activate learning mechanisms because interaction during collaboration may lead to disagreements, explanation, clarification, and other such cognitive processes. There is also some evidence that working together may allow learners to pool their linguistic resources resulting in writing output which is better than that which either individual might be able to produce alone. In this chapter, we contribute to the exploration of writing development with a study framed in sociocultural views of language learning in which students were asked to write a report in pairs (Session 1) upon which they were subsequently provided with feedback five days later (Session 2). We explore both the quantitative aspects of the data from the point of view of differences between session one and session two, and use the recorded discussion of the students in session two to try to illuminate the impact of the different types of feedback the students received on their subsequent output and to explore how this might lead to writing development.

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