Collaborative WRITING in the preparation of ESL graduate students Nigel Caplan nacaplan@udel.edu Assistant Professor, English Language Institute PhD Student, School of Education http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com/handouts/sslw2012 Work in progress – share the rationale, methods, and preliminary findings from a study we’ve just finished with ESL students here at UD.

“The Writing Process Colossal Concept Poster” Source: “The Writing Process Colossal Concept Poster” http://catalog.mcdonaldpublishingcatalog.com I teach at the ELI, and for years now I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the writing process. For a start, why THE? More importantly, the products are what count and the products weren’t great. Process writing has also been criticized by scholars like Lisa Delpitt for assuming that it’s all in the writer’s head – content, genre, everything. But for non-mainstream writers who don’t have access to the “culture of power” – genres – the results are failure and marginalization. Colossal or not, it doesn’t work for me. The attraction of collaborative writing (SEGUE FROM PREVIOUS PAPER) is that it allows us to see writing as both a social and an individual activity.

The Teaching-Learning Cycle My use of collaborative writing is within the broader framework of genre theory, specifically the one derived from SFL, aka Sidney School. The clearest pedagogical implementation of SFL genre-based pedagogy is the TLC. This is a sociocultural approach: scaffolding explicit instruction in high-powered school/professional genres, with recycling built in – as/if necessary -- until students achieve independent mastery. Martin: “guidance through interaction in the context of shared experience.” Widely implemented in Australian primary schools and to a lesser extent in other educational contexts. Difference w/ process writing, according to David Rose: “Process comes from idea of teaching from where they are at. Consequence is that they will always fail. […] TLC/genre designed to teach all students to do what they should.” (hence scaffolding – teaching in the ZPD) So, I’ve been using it with my pre-matriculation international graduate students – a very different population from the Australian Disadvantaged Schools Project, but also a group for whom the conventions and expectations of “knowledge genres” (Rose)/”language of schooling” (Schleppegrell) are opaque. Which begs the question: does it work? And if it does, why? There is research on the overall implementation of the TLC, but not on the relative contributions of each stage. Particularly interested in JC, which Rose and Martin recently described as “the most powerful classroom practice currently available as far as learning written genres is concerned” (2012, p. 73) – however, it is also the least studied stage (Dreyfus et al., 2011), so this is a claim I would like to test empirically. Martin, 2009; adapted from Rothery, 1996

Joint Construction 1. Pair Writing 2. Teacher-as-Scribe Instructional dialogue (Weissberg)

Why should it work? Socio-Cultural Approaches Cognitive Approaches Writing as social practice (Coffin et al.) Explicit genre instruction (Martin, etc.) Collaborative Writing (Storch & Wigglesworth) Cognitive Approaches Cognitive processes of expert writers (Flower & Hayes) (Meta-)Cognitive Strategy Instruction (MacArthur; Graham, etc.) Metacomment – cognitive cs SCA in Education PhD/faculty. CSI – making explicit cognitive processes that expert writers use (exactly what happens in teacher-led JC, or in a scaffolded pair context w/ one stronger writer). Note that collaborative modeling is a common part of CSI but as a means for teaching and practicing the metacognitive strategy, not for actually improving writing or language skills. And not generally applied to HE and/or ESL. SLA has a way to reconcile these intractable positions: interaction, negotiation, languaging – all see social practices as a way to develop interlanguage, individual cognitive skill. Break down “second language writing” – both teaching the language and control of the genres (the two are inextricably linked) within the context of “composition” – writing in the academy. That is, from an SFL perspective, there is no division between SLA and SLW, learning to write/writing to learn – lexicogrammar comprises the linguistics resources needed for writing specific genres.  Essentially, there are many good reasons to believe that JC will promote language acquisition, writing development, and composition skills. Second Language Acquisition Interaction (Gass) Negotiation (Pica) Languaging (Swain)

Context English Language Institute at a “mid-Atlantic research-intensive public university” Pre-MBA (Conditionally admitted MBA students) Reading/Writing for Graduate Programs (level VI) Target genres: persuasive writing & data commentary (Swales & Feak, 2012; cf also Storch & Wigglesworth, 2007) Why these genres? Part of the course b/c attested as important in graduate programs generally, and my needs analysis with the UD MBA confirms this. Also they are well explicated genres and accessible to students at this level.

Research Questions What is the nature of the interactions in two different joint construction tasks? Are the tasks qualitatively and/or quantitatively different? What effects does joint construction have on the language and generic staging of ESL students’ independent writing? Previous studies have found that JC plays “a central role in apprenticing students into the process of writing” (Dreyfus et al, 2011) – but they did not look at learning outcomes, in terms of language and/or composition. Australian research into genre pedagogy claims to have drammatically narrowed the achievement gap between mainstream and less-prepared (including ELL) students, with the weakest students “accelerating at up to 4 times their expected rates” (Rose & Martin, 2012). However, there does not appear to be any attempt to break down the mechanisms for this progress, and almost none of the studies cited to support this claim have been published in peer-reviewed journals. My RQ rather too boldly tried to move towards that, but in the end, I can only really consider the first question from what turned out to be a pilot study. So, to be continued. (There are some tentative qualitative answers to #2 in a different presentation on my blog.)

Methods and Data Collection Session IV (March-April) Session V (May-June) Persuasive Essay Pair Writing Teacher-as-Scribe Data Commentary 12 Chinese pre-MBA students in each session 3 of the students in Session IV repeated the course in Session V Theme of the courses was different: technology (IV) and ethics (V) Data collected: Video/audio recordings of the joint construction tasks Pair/group writing Diagnostic essay Post-instruction data commentary in-class essay Final timed essay (persuasive) Skip over

Languaging and Genre-ing? From the teacher-as-scribe data commentary task Genre structure: (Context) ^ Location statement (indicative or informative) ^ As + linking clause + highlight/focus ^ Implications, interpretations (Swales & Feak, 2012, Unit 4) * Excerpt: end of first paragraph (focus) In this excerpt you see the scaffolding approach (I’m clearly leading them in terms of rhetorical staging and sentence structure). But you can also see that the purpose of my recasting is to help us co-construct meaning. Notice also that I name the rhetorical and linguistic strategies (hedging, focus, cohesion), and I introduce a new one (noun modifiers). See how together, the teacher and the students are languaging about grammar, content, and genre structure/rhetoric at the same time. Lots of engagement. Now, the next question of course is whether they learn anything from the process, which is harder to demonstrate.

Pair Writing (Data Commentary) With increasing use of social network, some behaviors have been involved in conflicts of ethical issues by social networkers and other U.S. workers. Table 5 statistically shows the relationship between social network use and perception of ethical behavior. As can be seen, all behaviors investigated could be more easily accepted by social networkers than by other workers in U.S. The acceptance ratio of the behavior "Blog or tweet negatively about your company or colleagues" between social networkers and other workers is seven. This very high ratio has significantly indicated that social networks have lowered its users' ethical principles. Notice that this is grammatically very accurate, and overall, it’s quite well written, and this from students who were below level. In fact, none of the clauses contains a significant grammar error, with the infelicities largely due to odd word choice, unusual (but not grammatical) syntax, and a strange way of expressing a ratio. Also quite complex – noun clauses, expanded nominal groups, passive, present perfect. But short – exactly what Storch & Wrigglesworth found. One of the same students went on to write a data commentary independently which was not at the same standard.

Challenges with Data Collection Limitations of Technology Limited collaboration in some pairs Task Demands Time Demands (e.g some students type without “thinking aloud”) different abilities; time (collaborative writing is slow -- really slow! -- especially in the persuasive pair-writing task when they all got stuck on the introduction); very hard to write a complete text; course structure does not allow much time to teach the technique and allow multiple chances to practice (which would probably have better results)

Future Directions How do these joint construction tasks affect independent student writing? (Is there any evidence of transfer?) Do pair writing and teacher-as-scribe tasks affect student writing in distinct ways? What might be some successful strategies to develop for joint construction tasks in ESL graduate student writing courses?

Nigel A. Caplan Assistant Professor University of Delaware English Language Institute nacaplan@udel.edu PowerPoint and references available at http://nigelteacher.wordpress.com  Handouts  SSLW 2012