Small-Group Student Talk Before Individual Writing in Tertiary English Writing Classrooms in China: Nature and Insights

Abstract

When exploring the nature of small-group student talk in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) individual writing in terms of what students are talking about, previous studies have mainly linked it to students' writing and focused more on students' written texts than their talk. Consequently, the analyses have largely been text-oriented rather than talk-oriented and have failed to reveal a complete picture of such talk and the socially negotiated nature of the interaction. To fill up the literature gap, we designed a study to investigate the nature of prewriting small-group student talk in Chinese tertiary EFL writing classrooms. Specifically, we examined what students were talking about when engaging in argumentative writing tasks prior to individual writing. Eight hours of audio recordings of student talk from eight small groups in two classes (N = 48) were collected during their prewriting small-group discussions. They were analyzed and interpreted in six categories: Content talk, language talk, task-management talk, organization talk, affective talk, and phatic talk. Major findings show that small-group student talk: (1) enabled students to generate content, language, and organization for their proceeding individual writing; (2) provided them with opportunities to facilitate collaborative linguistic problem-solving and the deliberate use of the first language (L1) for requesting and clarifying information; (3) allowed them to organize the group and scaffold each other collectively to manage the ongoing process of the task; and (4) assisted them to share their emotions and maintain group harmony at a surface level but did not help generate direct positive or negative affective expressions. Pedagogical insights into L2 writing instruction are also discussed.

Dialogic discussion as a platform for constructing knowledge: student-teachers’ interaction patterns and strategies in learning to teach English

“…This inequity in contribution suggests differences in student teachers' inclinations towards group discussion, resulting in interesting interaction patterns. In a sense, some evidence was found that lends support to what has been reported in the literature on classroom interaction discourse (Basturkmen, 2003;Berry, 1981;Li et al, 2020;Stokoe, 2000).…”

“…Notably, the literature on the nature of talking to learn in higher education has been insufficient (cf. Basturkmen, 2003;Li, Zhang, & Parr, 2020); even less research has focused on talk among student teachers or their interaction patterns in teacher education settings. The available literature has explored talk in the English-for-academic-purposes (EAP) classroom represented by the teacher and students.…”

Teacher Written Feedback on English as a Foreign Language Learners’ Writing: Examining Native and Nonnative English-Speaking Teachers’ Practices in Feedback Provision

“…Apart from the eight teacher participants, 80 second-year students (11 males and 69 females) from the eight teachers’ classes participated in this study voluntarily. They were students in English major and the collection of data from such English-major students was due to the fact that only English-major students are offered English writing course separately in many Chinese universities ( Zhang, 2016 ; Li et al, 2020 ). All these students were Mandarin Chinese speakers and their ages ranged from 19 to 21 with, on average, 11 years of English learning experience.…”

“…In order to ensure the task difficulty, two measures were adopted. We, firstly, collected writing texts with a same genre, that is, argumentative writing, which is a commonly used assessment for L2 learners’ writing proficiency ( Li et al, 2020 ). In the Chinese tertiary EFL context, students tend to be asked to write argumentative essays in various large-scale standardized English proficiency tests such as IELTS, TOEFL, College English Test Band 4 and 6 (CET-4 and 6), and Test for English Majors Band 4 and 8 (TEM-4 and 8) ( Huang and Zhang, 2020 ).…”

A Sociocultural Perspective on English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) Teachers’ Cognitions About Form-Focused Instruction

“…English language education in China has gained its momentum since China adopted the policy of opening to the outside world in the 1980s (Wang and Gao, 2008;Li, 2012). However, Chinese University English teaching has been critiqued for its teacher-centred classrooms and traditional Grammar-Translation teaching methods (Zhang, 2015;Li et al, 2020). In response to this issue, the Chinese Ministry of Education (hereafter MOE), have made massive top-down reforms in advancing English Language Teaching (ELT) at the tertiary level (Zhang and Liu, 2014).…”