Collaborative Writing on Google Docs: Taiwanese Students’ Participation, Behaviors, and Writing Trajectories with Real-work Online Tasks

Abstract

In the past two decades, the growing rage of computer mediated environments (CMC) affords new literacies and new opportunities for language learners to experience, construct, communicate, and access knowledge (Ware, Kern & Warschauer, 2016). Also, it suggests that writing in multimodal in the digital ear contributes to its production and interpretation (Canagarajah, 2013) and can be particularly beneficial for L2 learners’ writing practices (Elola & Oskoz, 2010) such as writing quality (Stroch, 2005), writing fluency (Bloch, 2007), academic voices (Sperling & Appleman, 2011) and a sense of audience (Sun & Chang, 2012). Google Docs and online text-chat systems are prominent collaborative tools for group writing, and the result shows that the focus group displayed a mixed-interaction pattern, a collaborative pattern in two online text-chat systems, and a more dominant-passive pattern while co-constructing the text. They study also explored that changing the mode of communication from Line to Google Docs chat-room appears to have led to an increase in the participants’ interaction and communication and seems to have facilitated collaboration. Participants make a significant contribution of two types of writing changing functions, adding and correcting in the text and make revisions to their text.