Comparing Individual vs. Collaborative Writing in Spanish EFL Secondary Education: Insights From CAF Measures, Propositional Complexity, and Communicative Adequacy

Introduction

In modern literate societies, the acquisition of writing skills has become an indispensable requisite of a fully-functional language user. For second language (L2) learners, the writing skill constitutes an important goal to acquire (i.e., learning-to-write aim). Importantly, performing L2 writing tasks can also have an additional benefit of advancing general L2 proficiency in special ways (writing-to-learn dimension) (Manchón, 2013; Vasylets et al., 2019). Written activities, however, can be performed under individual or collaborative conditions. This basic distinction can have important consequences for both the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions, as these two writing conditions represent very different sites for task performance and learning. One of the ways to test differences between individual and collaborative writing conditions is by comparing their outcomes (i.e., written texts) in terms of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (Storch, 2011; 2013). Previous studies have shown that accuracy tends to be higher in collaborative writing, but the findings for fluency and grammatical complexity are less conclusive (Elabdali, 2021). Moreover, to our knowledge, only two studies have looked at lexical complexity measures, and there is no previous research which has examined differences between the two writing conditions in terms of propositional complexity or communicative adequacy. In addition, the vast majority of studies that examined the effects of collaborative writing on the quality of students’ texts have focused on university students (Elabdali, 2021; Zhang & Plonsky, 2020). To fill this research gap, this study aims to explore the potential differences in L2 texts written by L2 English secondary-school students in collaborative and individual conditions at three different levels: (a) the level of communicative efficiency of the performance (operationalized as communicative adequacy); (b) semantic level, which we explore via the assessment of propositional complexity (idea units); and (c) linguistic level, which is assessed by means of the measures of grammatical and lexical complexity, fluency, and accuracy.