Small-group Student Talk Before Individual Writing in Chinese Tertiary English-as-a-foreign-language Writing Classrooms: Nature, Effects, and Perceptions

Recent research in L2 addressing student talk for writing development has documented much on student talk in pairs/groups during collaborative writing tasks, or in peer feedback interactions for revision after writing. Comparatively, less is known about using student talk as prewriting discussions for collaborative planning prior to individual writing, particularly when it comes to the nature of such talk, whether it effectively develops students’ argumentative writing, and how students perceive the talk and its effects. To address these important issues, this study was designed with two phases and implemented in the Chinese tertiary EFL context. The phase-one multiple case study investigated the nature of small-group student talk and revealed six categories of student talk: content talk, language talk, organization talk, task-management talk, affective talk, and phatic talk. Major findings show that small-group student talk: 1) enabled students to generate content, language, and organization for their individual writing; 2) provided them with opportunities to facilitate collaborative linguistic problem-solving and the deliberate use of L1 for requesting and clarifying information; 3) allowed them to organize the group and scaffold each other collectively to manage the ongoing process of the task, and 4) assisted them to share their emotions and maintain group harmony at a surface level but did not help generate direct positive or negative affective expressions. The phase-two quasi-experimental study examined the effects of structured small-group student talk. Statistical analyses in this phase revealed that students in the intervention group outperformed their comparison group peers in argumentative writing performance. The effects were statistically significant in facilitating students’ writing improvement in the content, organization, vocabulary, and language use, but not mechanics. Immediate and sustained effects were found on the quality of counterargument claim, counterargument data, and rebuttal claim. No discernible differences were found either between or within the intervention group and the comparison group concerning the quality of claim, data, and rebuttal data across tests. The analysis of students’ perceptions yielded results that aligned with those obtained from the quantitative data and offered in-depth insights complementing such quantitative findings. This study concludes with a summary of major findings and a discussion of the contributions, implications, and limitations for L2 writing instruction and research.

Name thesis:degree_name

PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Education

Grantor dc:publisher

ResearchSpace@Auckland

Year dc:date.issued

2024

Author dc:creator

• Li, Hui

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Zhang, Lawrence Jun
• Parr, Judy M

• EFL Writing

Statement dc:rights

• Items in ResearchSpace are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/docs/uoa-docs/rights.htm

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/2292/73843

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:researchspace.auckland.ac.nz:2292/73843