The Effectiveness of Collaborative Writing for Development of EFL learners’ Individual Writing Skills

Abstract: The following study investigates the possible advantages of using collaborative writing to facilitate development of individual EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' writing skills. In a comparative study on European students’ foreign language proficiency (Costa & Albergaria-Almeida, 2015), only about forty per cent of the participating students, including Swedish secondary students, exhibited competency in levels B1 and B2 in terms of writing proficiency, a stage of progression which Swedish students are expected to achieve when entering lower and upper-secondary education. As a result, a call for action is made to address current teaching strategies for language learning, and collaborative writing is being considered for its potential. Contemporary research regarding collaborative writing presents mostly positive improvements on L2 learners’ writing ability, but some disagreement exists amongst researchers in terms of which features actually improve. In this paper, we present an overview and analysis of contemporary primary research that investigates potential benefits of implementing collaborative writing into the communicative classroom. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of the studies for the Swedish educational context, including what important pedagogical considerations must be taken into account when implementing collaborative writing. Finally, the findings are discussed in relation to Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of learning, Krashen’s comprehensible input hypothesis, and Swain’s comprehensible output hypothesis.