Effects of Collaborative Writing in Weblogs = Effects of Collaborative Writing in Weblogs

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This study aims to examine the effects of elementary students` collaborative writing in weblogs. The students` writing was evaluated using weblogs in one of two modes, collaboration or non-collaboration. The answers to the following two questions provide the pedagogical implications and insights for researchers and teachers: 1) Whether language proficiencies in two modes, collaboration or non-collaboration, result in significant differences in writing improvement?; 2) How do students respond to using weblogs as a writing tool? Each student wrote six essays. The participants pre-treatment writing and post-treatment writing were analyzed to examine their writing improvement through collaboration by linguistic features, fluency, accuracy, and grammatical complexity. As for writing improvement, the collaboration group especially demonstrated enhanced fluency. Also, the findings of the present study provide strong evidence that collaboration between peers acted as a important factor for enhancing writing quality according to the questionnaire results. It can be concluded that collaboration mode is generally more effective between the two modes. As shown in this research, collaboration mode provides a cooperative atmosphere which provides writers more opportunity to freely exchange their opinions. The present study suggests that collaboration weblog writing can be effective for students to enhance their writing ability.