An Experimental Investigation in to the Effect of Students’ Collaborative Writing in an Online Milieu

Inspired by Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of mind, current models of writing instruction have been demonstrating a great emphasis placed on personal voice, writers’ interactions with their community, and collaborative writing. Moreover, the fast and vast improvements that have taken place with the advent of new internet affordancesand web developments over the last decades have brought about a growing interest among researchers in the field of L2 writing. In view of these, the present study aims at investigating the effect of online collaborative writing through Web 2.0 technology among Iranian EFL learners. A quasi-experimental design was employed in this study: Forty L2 learners with a pre-intermediate level of English proficiency were assigned to an experimental (N = 20) and a control (N = 20) group. Learners in the experimental group were taught writing collaboratively in an online environment, whereas learners in the control group practiced conventional individual writing in the same environment. esults from two paired samples t-tests showed that, regarding the difference between their Time 1 and Time 2 performances, the learners in the experimental group outperformed those in the control group. The results are discussed in relation to Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory of mind.

Keywords:

Vygotsky , online collaboration , web 2.0 technology , Google Docs