Effects of Collaborative Dialogues on Taiwanese EFL Writing Performance

• Main Authors: Chu-yao Chiu, 邱筑瑤
• Other Authors: Su-chin Shih
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/59610892866354047639

博士 === 國立高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 101 === This dissertation aimed to investigate the effects of collaborative dialogues on Taiwanese freshmen’s L2 writing ability. It also addressed the roles of noticing and learner uptake in relation to L2 writing. The participants were 22 freshmen from a public university in southern Taiwan. They were invited to complete two written drafts and to revise each draft by means of collaborative dialogues and think-aloud protocols, respectively. In this study, collaborative dialogues served as the major feedback task to explore the role of noticing on L2 writing while think-aloud protocols were used as the controlling task for further comparison. To be specific, this dissertation explored whether collaborative dialogues improved the students’ L2 writing ability and further facilitated learner uptake with respect to their noticing ability. In this study, L2 writing ability was measured by global assessment. The global assessment refers to holistic scoring on students’ writing performance. Noticing ability was explored within two levels of processing: the surface level and deep level. The surface level refers to the textual clues, including lexis, grammar and discourse aspects. The deep level means the cognitive clues, involving noticing with reasons, noticing only, and noticing with uncertainty. It is generally accepted that arousing the noticing ability has positive impacts on the students’ L2 writing ability. That is to say, learners’ ability to notice their problems may promote learner uptake. Collected data related to L2 writing ability and noticing ability discussed above were analyzed by means of statistical measures and qualitative descriptions in order to probe the complexity of L2 writing process. With regard to the results of data analysis, the findings were summarized below: 1. Collaborative dialogues had significantly better effects than think-aloud protocols on the students’ L2 writing achievement. Moreover, collaborative dialogues could effectively enhance their L2 writing improvement. Thus, collaborative dialogues played a critical role to improve EFL students’ L2 writing ability. 2. Collaborative dialogues successfully promoted the students’ uptake of the problems highlighted by themselves. To be specific, they self-repaired 78% of the problems successfully during collaborative dialogues. 3. Although both the skilled writers and the less-skilled writers demonstrated uptake of their lexical and grammatical problems well, the skilled writers tended to show a better ability to self-repair discourse problems than the less-skilled ones did. 4. Collaborative dialogues successfully facilitated learner uptake on the three noticing levels – noticing with reasons, noticing only, and noticing with uncertainty. The students generally showed their best uptake of the problems by noticing with reasons and made the lowest successful repairs by noticing with uncertainty. 5. Both the skilled writers and the less-skilled writers successfully promoted uptake of their problems by noticing with reasons. The skilled writers, however, demonstrated better learner uptake of the problems by adopting the strategy of noticing only than the less-skilled ones. On the contrary, the less-skilled writers made much more successful uptake of the problems by noticing with uncertainty than the skilled writers. Based on the findings, this dissertation may have three aspects of contributions. First of all, this study not only provided empirical supports to the theories of noticing and uptake in SLA research, but also helped understand EFL learners’ mental processing in L2 writing. Secondly, with regard to its practical significance, this study also discovered that arousing students’ quality of noticing may contribute to their L2 writing ability to revise a better essay. The close association between L2 writing ability and noticing ability further strengths the importance of incorporating collaborative dialogue activity in L2 writing classes. Thirdly, this study also helped facilitate Taiwanese EFL learning process. The noticing awareness through collaborative dialogues highlighted in the study required the students to actively interact with diverse written texts and their peers. Through collaborative practices, students work together to increase their uptake and eventually reach language acquisition on their own. To sum up, this dissertation demonstrated the effects of collaborative dialogues on EFL students’ L2 writing ability and quality of noticing. It is hoped that this study can draw more attention from SLA researchers to the investigation of noticing and learner uptake in L2 writing.