Improving the revising stage when writing through collaborative work on EFL students

Abstract

This study aimed at analyzing how students’ collaboration when writing encourages peer review and provides effective written feedback through Google Docs. The research addressed the revising stage of the writing process. An action research investigation analyzed quantitative and qualitative data collected from a group of 26 participants of a private higher education institution in Ecuador. The instruments used to collect data included pre-and-post-tests, field notes, and face-to-face interviews. The results evidenced that collaborative work improved students’ performance at the time of writing and enriched their texts. The analyzed constructs included the topic sentence, supporting details, organization and transition, style and mechanics. All constructs tested at the end of the innovation improved in more than 99.38%. The effect size in all constructs had a value greater than 0.8, which means that the improvement was significant. The most important progress for the study was shown in the results of Supporting Details and Topic Sentence with a coefficient of variation of 0.1489 and 0.1433 respectively, which means that there is 14% dispersion among their data. This result indicates that the values are close to their mean.