Collaborative Writing: Fostering Foreign Language and Writing Conventions Development (Report‪)‬

INTRODUCTION A wide variety of collaborative work is frequently used to develop oral skills in the foreign language (FL) classroom. In FL writing, however, peer response is the only form of collaborative work that has been widely adopted and studied since the 1990s (Hyland, 2000; Liang, 2010; Lockhart & Ng, 1995; Villamil & de Guerrero, 1996). In contrast, the practice of collaborative writing, two or more people working together to produce a document with group responsibility for the end product (Bosley, 1989), has only been cautiously trialed to date. Research into collaborative writing, both in the first language (L1) and second language (L2), has shown that this pedagogical approach has great potential; it demands reflective thinking, helps learners to focus on grammatical accuracy, lexis and discourse, and it encourages a pooling of knowledge about the language (DiCamilla & Anton, 1997; Donato, 1994; Hirvela, 1999; Storch, 2002; Swain & Lapkin, 1998).