Методика преподавания языка | Филологический аспект: Методика преподавания языка и литературы Методика преподавания языка и литературы №01 (12) Январь 2022-Февраль 2022

Преподавание грамматики с помощью микро-коллаборативного письма в классе EFL: расширение возможностей навыков письма.

Чуишбеков Данияр
Магистрант второго курса в Университете Сулеймана Демиреля, Касакелен, Казахстан

Аннотация: Цель исследования - изучить, как учащиеся усваивают грамматику с помощью микро-коллаборативного письма в классах EFL, а также проанализировать свои ожидания через призму результатов. Исследование выявило интересный вывод, который может характеризовать только носителей казахского языка при изучении английского языка.
Ключевые слова: совместное написание (далее MCW), продуктивные навыки, написание, парные написание, групповое написание.

Chuishbekov Daniyar
Suleyman Demirel University, Kazakhstan

Abstract: The study aims to study how learners acquire grammar through Micro Collaborative Writing in EFL classrooms and also analyze their anticipations through the prism of the results. The study uncovers an interesting finding which can characterize only Native Kazakh speakers while learning English.
Keywords: Mirco Collaborative Writing (further MCW), productive skills, writing, peer writing, group writing.

Introduction

The writing skill is one of the essential and challenging skills in the language learning procedure. Usually, the challenging part is the grammar part. Perhaps learners might know the rules, formulas of grammar, however, they are not able to employ this knowledge. It's possible that teaching students to create a target structure that they already know but aren't ready to create won't work. Furthermore, requiring students to construct complex grammar structures and then correcting them when they make mistakes may heighten their anxiety and result in a psychological barrier to learning anything (Krashen, 1982). An alternative approach to teaching grammar is to design activities that focus learners’ attention on a targeted structure in the input and enable them to identify and comprehend the meaning(s) of the structure (Rod Ellis, 1995). It is important to create a positive learning environment during teaching the writing skill, and collaborative writing has shown its effectiveness in language learning. Collaborative writing as an instructional activity has gained much attention in a second language or foreign language context over recent decades (e.g. Storch 2005; Fernández Dobao 2012). In addition, collaborative writing has been found to aid in the development of individual students’ writing skills. Writing in small groups or dyads allows students to model and learn from one another's writing and regulation processes, as well as enhance conceptual learning, critical reflection, and audience awareness (Klein, 2014; Nykopp, Marttunen, & Laurinen, 2014; van Steendam, 2016). In collaborative writing, learners have time to think, discuss, draft, and correct each others’ mistakes. Collaborative writing is described as an activity in which two or more students work together to produce a single text throughout the writing process. It necessitates learners' mutual engagement, ongoing peer interaction, cooperation, shared making decisions, and shared responsibility for task completion (McDonough, Crawford and De Vlesschauwer. 2016, Storch 2005). Additionally, many researchers have investigated group dynamics, with the majority concluding that learners gain more from collaborative interaction environments. (Fernandez Dobao, 2012,  Li and Zhu. 2017, Storch, 2002, Walls, 2018, Watanabe and Swain. 2007).

The current study aims to investigate the effectiveness of teaching grammar through micro collaborative writing by analyzing the quality, accuracy, complexity, and proper use of the grammar of learners’ collaborative written assignments. Moreover, the study examines whether learners extended their writing skills or not and did they become grammar aware.

In Second Language writing classes, small group/pair work in Second Language writing classrooms was generally limited to either brainstorming or peer assessment. (Storch, 2005). Collaborative writing refers to “an activity where there is a shared and negotiated decision-making process and a shared responsibility for the production of a single text” (Storch, 2013). From the perspective of Vygotsky’s theory learners work with their cognitive abilities while formulating writing tasks with their pairs. In the collaborative writing classes, the teacher is not the source of knowledge but rather learners build knowledge through interaction with each other. Collaborative writing assignments allow students to produce language and acquire language while interacting with their peers, i.e., writing to learn (Manchón, 2011; Storch, 2013). Some studies revealed that during collaborative writing learners focus on language-related tasks and are not distracted by other things. In collaborative writing, learners help each other to develop not only writing skills but also critical thinking, problem-solving, and teamwork abilities. In addition, learners need to reflect on both the writing process and the written material in order to become excellent writers: "Many researchers on written composition presume that the act of writing and conscious understanding and control of text generation and speech processes are interconnected." (Camps, Milian, 2000).

Additionally, in collaborative writing learners tend to be more accurate in terms of grammar, word selection, and the complexity of the task. However, the collaborative writing approach is suitable for intermediate and high-level learners since they are able to apply learned materials easily.

What about learners with a low language level? Perhaps, the collaborative writing approach might be difficult for them. More importantly, the collaborative writing tasks enable students to think and speak more than before (Lin L. 2015). That is why this approach needs adoption according to learners’ needs. The study examines the development of learners’ writing skills through micro collaborative writing, also the study guide with the following questions:

1. What is learners' anticipation towards Micro Collaborative Writing in Teaching Grammar? Survey.
2. How do Elementary level learners receive Micro Collaborative Writing? Lesson Observation.

Method

Participants and Group Formation. The participants of the study included 11 teenage learners in a local Language Center in Shymkent, Kazakhstan (4 boys and 7 girls). Participants’ ages vary from thirteen to sixteen at the time of participating in the study. There are seven Kazakh, three Uzbek, one Korean learners but as L1 (First Language) they share the Russian language. They enrolled in a General English course in October: a new semester according to the Language Center’s policy. Before enrolling in the course they passed a diagnostic test for the level and their level of English language proficiency is high elementary as stated in CEFR standard - A2. At the beginning of the course, learners were notified that they were going to participate in the study and all of them agreed. Additionally, they were introduced to the ethics of the study: anonymity, confidentiality, voluntary participation. Participants were randomly split into five groups: four groups with two students and one group formed with three students. Also, they were told that each lesson would be integrated with MCW  (Micro Collaborative Writing) tasks. The research continued for three weeks and they received nine MCW lessons in total (see Appendix A).

Instruments. Three instruments would be employed for this study: a paper survey with open-ended questions, a text quality rubric, and lessons observation by a teacher. The paper survey with open-ended questions is the first stage of the study: there are five open-ended questions that the learners are invited to respond to (see Appendix B). The text quality rubric consists of three one-point elements: vocabulary range, the use of proper grammar structure, and organization (see Appendix C). In each lesson, learners should follow the rubric and do their micro writing tasks according to the rubric.

The final stage is note-taking by a teacher. Taking notes while listening to a lecture is a typical practice among college students when being presented a lecture. Note-taking is widely thought to aid in the learning and retention of lecture material (Huei-Chun Teng. 2011). But, in this study, the teacher should take notes on how learners acquire grammar structures through micro collaborative writing. The teacher has a special notebook for the notes where a teacher writes learners’ opinions, feedback, and challenges that learners might face during the study and notes will be attached below as an artifact of the study.

Data Collection

First Step

The first step of the data collection was to gather a survey with open-ended questions. There are five questions asked for the learners (see Appendix B) and the questions were in English but learners responded in Kazakh or Russian languages since their level of English proficiency and writing competence is a high elementary or A1 according to CEFR standard. The data were collected at the beginning of the MCW research. Although all learners were approved to take part in the study,  two learners failed to provide complete data due to their absence on the day of data collection or did not finish their open-ended survey responses fully. For the first question of the survey with open-ended questions (see Appendix A) three respondents answered that their level of writing is low and one learner responded that his level is six out of ten whereas the other participants replied with an average level. The second question is devoted to the difficulties in writing and most learners mentioned that they struggle in words as they change or miss letters order. Another learner highlighted that while writing she forgets all the grammar rules and confuses tenses, noted grammar rules are challenging for her. Especially when it comes to the third person in the Simple Present Tense. But the third person –s in English as a Second Language (ESL), was categorized by Krashen (Krashen. 1982) as effortless to acquire because it is simple, and by Ellis (Rod Ellis. 1990) as difficult to learn because it is complex. For this question another learner answered “good”, perhaps he or she did not understand the question well. Almost all the participants had no idea about the third question or collaborative writing and never practiced it except one participant. She expressed an opinion that collaborative working is doing tasks with your pair or your group, sharing opinions, and brainstorming on a particular task. For the fourth question, all answers were positive, four learners indicated that the MCW could help them to improve their writing abilities whereas others believed that speaking could be improved. Altogether, the learners considered that the MCW could contribute to the enhancement of their productive skills: writing and speaking. The last question of the survey was about the participants' expectations about the MCW. The vast majority of learners noted that they awaited improvements in their writing (able to write correct sentences) and speaking (enhance vocabulary scope) skills, one learner wrote that the MCW could enrich their vocabulary. Interestingly, according to the learner's opinion, thinking ability also could develop. Higgins L. and et.al proved the opinion of the learner (Higgins L. and et.al. 1992) that the research conducted in ESL settings had shown collaborative writing could help students develop reflective thinking skills, especially when they are explaining and defending their ideas to their classmates.

Second Step

The second step of the study was to introduce learners to a specially prepared rubric that they should follow during the study. Similarly, each group received a rubric and gave them back to a teacher at the end of each lesson in order not to lose the rubric during the research. In the beginning, they get confused since they were not familiar with this kind of rubrics before, they did not use any type of rubrics at their school, either. However, a teacher explained how to work with rubrics and learners also made clarifications about the rubric.

Third Step

The third step of the study was taking notes from learners. According to Ryan (2001), there are six categories of note-taking strategies, and a teacher used a decoding strategy. This was done for the purpose of answering the second question: How do Elementary level learners receive Micro Collaborative Writing?

A teacher wrote a note-taking journal at the end of each lesson. In the journal the teacher recorded the lesson wholly and these notes are attached here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZipEClC3GKcrW51mwonstHHFJRZRxv1j/view?usp=sharing). Each note includes the technique for the writing activity, the topic, the grammar structure, and the teacher's objective opinion about the learners’ progress. Below, written only important parts of the notes with the purpose of avoiding tautology in this article. Nevertheless, all the artifacts related to the note-taking journal can be found here (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZipEClC3GKcrW51mwonstHHFJRZRxv1j/view?usp=sharing).

The first lesson was devoted to the grammar structure “Present Simple” and the topic was “Is social media good or bad?” (opinion essay: where learners should share their opinion about the very topic in written form with their partners). They were presented with the technique of writing, and what to include in their MCW activities. After an explanation from the teacher, they began to brainstorm the topic with their partners. It was very hard for them since they had never written before. In their writing papers, they erased some parts and wrote them again and here it is clear their lack of confidence in writing and the average word count for the first lesson was 25,5 words for each group.

The second lesson’s grammar structure was “Present Simple”, and the main topic was “ Is junk food good or bad?”.  The teacher presented the topic and asked learners to write. They worked in pairs and made a pleasant noise since this time they were actively involved in the process, learners who regard group work as advantageous and useful for success are more likely to participate actively in group activities and collaborate with other group members to achieve success (Dornyei, 2001, Lin, 2016), and even asked help from the teacher whether their sentences were correct or not. They have a poor vocabulary scope therefore participants questioned the teacher with the translation of the words. Also, they made mistakes in words: in order to write the word “because” they wrote “becaus” and other common words such as “usefool”, “diffrent”, “somthing”, the reason for writing with mistakes is they write words in the way they hear. But, the benefit of collaborative working is revealed here since the writer then reflects on the correctness of the word or sentence he is about to write down, and recruits his peers (Kendrick & Drew, 2016) to assist him with solving his pressing problem. They performed this task for quite a long time and the average word count per group was 23,5 words.

The seventh lesson was dedicated to the grammar structures Present Simple and Past Simple. The learners were given a list of famous markets around the world and chose them by brainstorming with their partners and searching for information from the internet. The teacher noticed that they googled information in English and immediately started to read carefully then discussed it with their peers. Also, their confidence was quite good compared to writing assignments that were done before, they selectively chose what words to use. Additionally, their grammar structures also became complex since they combined Present Simple and Past Simples and they have learned to define the differences, attempted to provide detailed writing. In the seventh lesson, their approximate word count was 33,8 words per group, which means they increased the number of words in their MCW activities by around 35 percent. The learners maintain this number of words till the end of the study with a slight increase of around 1,7 words. As the teacher noticed they made a few mistakes in grammar structures and at the end of the study the teacher inquired several questions regarding the MCW activities. For the first question “How was the Micro Collaborative Writing?” all the learners' answers were positive as anticipated. They said that they really enjoyed it and one of them mentioned “Finally, we started to write. (laugh). Since we started to make sentences by using linking words such as I believe, I think.”, and the second question was about grammar “Did this method help you with the grammar part? If yes, how was it?”, they said that they became aware of grammar mistakes and they were able to notice mistakes and correct mistakes on time. A learner highlighted “For example when you write something, at the end you re-read it and you notice your mistakes and correct them.” At the beginning of the study, the teacher indicated the vast majority of learners put the action verb at the end of the sentences, for instance, they wrote: “I at 9 o'clock get up” instead of “I get up at 9 o’clock” and this occurrence has its reason. As mentioned above seven participants’ mother tongue is Kazakh and in the Kazakh language verbs are always placed at the end of sentences, that is why learners did the same unconsciously. DeKeyser (DeKeyser. 2005) during a 6-week stay in Argentina, also documented a virtual absence of verb order for any form of the verb in sentences among Spanish learners. However, the teacher explained the difference between Kazakh and English languages and learners acquired it without any hesitation. For the next question about collaborative working learners demonstrated a positive attitude, they acknowledged the benefits of peer interaction. As Mengying Zhai mentioned (2021) during this phase, students were positive and motivated about collaborating with classmates and believed that peer collaboration could have benefits such as getting different perspectives from others to enhance their learning, collaborating with unfamiliar peers, and potentially improving the quality of their writing. Although prior research has shown that students' attitudes regarding peer collaboration and group interactions are influenced by their perceptions of their usefulness, CW (e.g., Chen & Yu, 2019a; de Saint Leger ´ & Mullan, 2014; Fernandez ´ Dobao & Blum, 2013; Shehadeh, 2011), cultural values, it has been suggested, may also have an impact on students' attitudes about peer work.

Conclusion

The present study investigated Teaching Grammar through Micro Collaborative Writing in the EFL Classroom and how learners receive it during three weeks of implementation of the research in an Elementary Level Classroom in Shymkent, Kazakhstan. Generally, findings were positive about MCW activities, but there were some learners who struggled with these activities since they lacked background knowledge (https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZipEClC3GKcrW51mwonstHHFJRZRxv1j/view?usp=sharing). The study raised two questions and for each question, there were employed two instruments: an open-ended survey, lesson observation. The first part of data collection aimed to answer the first question of the study “What are learners' anticipation towards Micro Collaborative Writing in Teaching Grammar?”. As mentioned above, learners expected productive results from the study and their expectancies were notably positive. The second stage of the study tried to uncover the second question of the research and provided detailed information about learners’ attitudes toward MCW and answered the question.

There are several limitations of this research. First, the group size was small and there were learners who did not participate in the study fully since the study was conducted at a private language course. The second limitation would be their age, as mentioned above their ages varied from thirteen to sixteen and this might lead to a disbalance in their background knowledge and understanding for this reason it is recommended to carry out the research at Secondary Schools, Colleges, and Universities where the learner's background, age, interests match. The length of the study also could be considered as a limitation since for reasonable and explicit study results it would be great to conduct at least eight weeks of research. 

Despite its limitations, the study showed how MCW could be implemented at local schools and revealed an interesting finding of grammar mistakes that could be made by Kazakh language speakers. Overall, learners' anticipations matched with a real experiment.

Appendixes

Appendix A.

1. Stephen Krashen. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition
2. Rod Ellis. 1995. Interpretation Tasks for Grammar Teaching
3. Neomy Storch. 2005. Collaborative writing: Product, process, and students’ reflections
4. Ana M Fernandez Dobao. 2015. Collaborative Writing in L2 Classrooms.
5. Neomy Storch. 2013. Collaborative Writing in L2 Classrooms
6. Rosa M Manchon. 2011. Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language
7. Robert M. DeKeyser. 2005. What Makes Learning Second-Language Grammar Difficult? A Review of Issues
8. McDonough, Crawford, and De Vleeschauwer 2016. Thai EFL learners’ interaction during collaborative writing tasks and its relationship to text quality: Pedagogical potential and research agenda
9. Neomy Storch, 2005. Collaborative writing: Product, process, and students’ reflections
10. Higgins, L., Flower, L., & Petraglia, J. 1992. Planning text together. The role of critical reflection in student collaboration. Written Communication
11. Robert M. DeKeyser. 2005. Monitoring processes in Spanish as a second language during a study abroad program. Manuscript in preparation
12. Mengying Zhai. 2021. Collaborative writing in a Chinese as a foreign language classroom: Learners’ perceptions and motivations
13. Perry. D. Klein. 2014. Knowledge Construction in Collaborative Science Writing: Strategic Simplicity, Distributed Complexity, and Explanatory Sophistication
14. Minna Nykopp, Miika Marttunen, and Leena Laurinen. 2014. University Students’ Knowledge Construction during Face to Face Collaborative Writing
15. Elke van Steendam. 2016. Editorial Form of Collaborative Writing.
16. Kobin H. Kendrick & Paul Drew. 2016. Recruitment: Offers, Requests, and the Organization of Assistance in Interaction
17. Chen.Wenting, Shulin Yu. 2019. Implementing collaborative writing in teacher-centered classroom contexts: Student beliefs and perceptions. Language Awareness
18. Diane de Saint Leger, Kerry Mulan. 2014. “A good all-round French workout” or “a massive stress”?: Perceptions of group work among tertiary learners of French
19. Ana Fernández Dobao, Avram Blum. 2012. Collaborative writing in pairs and small groups: Learners’ attitudes and perceptions.
20. Ali Shehadeh. 2011. Effects and student perceptions of collaborative writing in L2
21. Council of Europe. https://www.coe.int/en/web/common-european-framework-reference-languages/table-1-cefr-3.3-common-reference-levels-global-scale
22. Ana Fernández Dobao. 2012. Collaborative writing tasks in the L2 classroom: Comparing group, pair, and individual work
23. Mimi Li, Wei Zhu. 2017. Good or bad collaborative wiki writing: Exploring links between-group interactions and writing products
24. Neomy Storch. 2008. Patterns of interaction in ESL pair work
25. Laura. C. Walls. 2018. The effect of dyad type on collaboration: Interactions among heritage and second language learners
26. Yuko Watanabe, Merill Swain. 2007. Effects of proficiency differences and patterns of pair interaction on second language learning: Collaborative dialogue between adult ESL learners
27. Anna Camps, Marta Milian. 2000. Metalinguistic Activity in Learning to Write
28. Lin Lin. 2015. Investigating Chinese HE EFL Classrooms. Using Collaborative Learning to Enhance Learning
29. Huei-Chun Teng. 2011. Exploring Note-taking Strategies of EFL Listeners
30. Michael P. Ryan. 2001. Conceptual models of lecture learning: Guiding metaphors and model-appropriate note-taking practices
31. Zoltan Dornyei, Ema Ushioda. 2001. Teaching and Researching: Motivation
32. Lin Lin. 2015. Investigating Chinese HE EFL Classrooms. Using Collaborative Learning to Enhance Learning