Collaborating beyond Peer Review

Storch, Neomy. “Collaborative Writing: Product, Process, and Students’ Reflections.” Journal of Second Language Writing 14 (2005): 153-73. Print.

As the academic and professional worlds students are entering become more collaborative in nature, writing instructors who offer students collaborative opportunities are likely providing them with necessary tools for their future work. Storch argues in this article that collaboration goes beyond providing students with useful tools; collaboration helps students produce better work.

She draws on the Vygotskyan roots of collaboration in education to argue that peers can play a role in scaffolding learning. These benefits, however, are underutilized. Typically, collaboration in the writing process is limited to peer review. Not only does this come late in the writing process, but, as she notes, peer review often emphasizes the final product and superficial matters. On the other hand, she also points to research that highlights the benefits of collaborative writing at earlier stages of the writing process. These earlier incorporations lead to a sense of shared responsibility (co-authoring) and fuller considerations of more meaningful issues (such as content and effectiveness).

While she agrees with these benefits, she also notes that the studies were often limited to surveys of students instead of interviews and often focused on group work generally as opposed to collaborative writing specifically. In her study, then, she tape recorded students working in pairs (she allowed them to self-select pair or individual work to reduce ethical conflicts of forcing students into group projects). She then interviewed the students who worked in pairs for their feelings about the usefulness/effectiveness of the collaborative task. Finally, she examined the texts produced by the pairs in relation to those produced by individuals to evaluate their accuracy (mostly grammatical correctness) and complexity (referring to use of more complex sentence structures). Using these three threads of information, she ultimately concluded that students in pairs produced more effective texts and valued collaborative writing, though they did have a few concerns about the process, stemming mostly from fears of hurting others’ feelings, concerns about one’s own English proficiency, and views of writing as an individual activity.

This study, then, mostly supports perspectives many writing teachers have: collaborative writing can be beneficial for students’ learning. I did have one main reservation about her methods. This was a timed, in-class activity, and she was making several judgments about the effectiveness of collaborative writing based on how they engaged in the writing process. While process is undoubtedly a part of in-class work, I think we might have better insight into the effectiveness of collaborative writing from a longer, multi-draft assignment, which she does recognize at the end. Nonetheless, I think Storch provides some evidence as to the value of collaborative writing and about the value of giving L2 students “the opportunity to give and receive immediate feedback on language” (168). Finally, she also reminds us that to implement such pedagogical practices effectively, we must prepare students for this work—something she admits was lacking in her own practices—and we must construct assignments that respect their ability to choose for themselves if they want to work alone or collaboratively.