Collaborative Writing Factors Affecting English as a Foreign Language Student Writing Performance

Introduction

Collaborative writing (CW) has its roots in collaborative learning in which students work methodically in teams or groups to complete their assigned tasks (Lin & Maarof, 2013). Storch (2011) defined CW as “the joint production of a text by two or more writers” (p. 275). In this sense, it can be inferred that two or more students collaborate to write a single text, and the written production in collaborative learning is truly a team effort.

Earlier studies mainly targeted the effects of CW on students’ learning results, and the publicized CW findings came mostly from quasi-experimental research, in which students were divided into two groups. Comparing pre-test and post-test results, researchers found that experimental group students outperformed the control group (Anshu & Yesuf, 2022). Specifically, CW was found to enhance students’ scores (Huynh, 2022), overall performance (Li, 2023; Phuong & Nguyen, 2021), writing skills (Alawaji, 2020; Helaluddin et al., 2023), accuracy (Huong & Phung, 2023), and fluency (Lin & Maarof, 2013; Pham, 2021). In terms of text quality, CW was reported to improve students’ content, organization, grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics (Khatib & Meihami, 2015), and collaboratively written texts were shorter but more grammatically and lexically complex than individually written ones (Pham, 2021).

Previous CW findings additionally showed that students preferred CW to individual writing. Particularly, CW offers a motivating learning experience to learners and helps promote the student-centered approach (Pham, 2021). Concerning students’ engagement with CW, Martin et al. (2020) explained that CW is effective in writing learning in the dimensions of rich feedback, motivation, collaboration, satisfaction, and writing. Furthermore, CW is an opportunity to generate ideas, plan what to write, and provide peer feedback, which helps improve students’ writing performance (WP; Pham, 2021), and it can be incorporated into a range of learning forms as an active process for learners (Helaluddin et al., 2023). Empirical evidence demonstrates that students hold positive attitudes towards CW (Huynh, 2022; Phuong & Nguyen, 2021) and actively respond to it whenever it is administered in class (Helaluddin et al., 2023).

Most CW research in the literature praised the efficacy of CW and pointed out its advantages on students’ learning results, but little was done to determine how CW factors work in concert to generate those advantages. Moreover, among a few survey-based studies conducted to understand the factors affecting students’ results, earlier researchers normally treated environmental factors (EF), individual beliefs (BL), and/or behavioral factors (BF) as the direct determinants of students’ results (Nguyen & Le, 2018; Qureshi et al., 2021). As those previous studies focused on the direct effects of influencing factors on learners’ WP, the indirect effects tended to be ignored.

Because a thorough understanding of the complex causality between CW and WP is limited, the author used an exploratory mixed methods research design based on Bandura’s (1989) social cognitive learning theory (SCLT) as the framework to examine the CW factors that hierarchically influence English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ WP. Comprehensively encompassing the multi-layer nuances of the CW environment, the present study aims to provide systems information on how and how much CW factors affect students’ WP. Ultimately, the findings answer the following research questions:

• 1.

  What CW factors affect EFL students’ WP?

• 2.

  How large are the effects of CW factors on EFL students’ WP?