Effects of collaborative writing on attitudes of learners towards writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT Title: Effects of Collaborative Writing on Attitudes of Learners Towards Writing at Anadolu University Preparatory School Author İlkay Gökçe Thesis Chairperson: Dr. Hossein Nassaji Bilkent University, MA TEFL Program Committee members: Dr. James Stalker Dr. William Snyder Writing is generally thought to be a difficult, boring, and complex job as a skill to be taught and learned. These properties of writing might result in learners' having negative attitudes towards writing. The purpose of this study was applying collaborative writing at Anadolu University Preparatory School (AUPS) to see the effects of it on learners' attitudes towards writing. This study was done to find the answers to these questions: 1) What are the effects of collaborative writing on students' attitudes towards writing? 2) Does `level` have a significant role on change of learners' attitudes? I had null hypotheses including that collaboration in writing does not have any positive effect on attitudes of learners towards writing and proficiency levels do not have a significant role in terms of attitudes towards writing. The participants were 6 1 upper-intermediate and advanced level students at AUPS whose ages were from 17 to 21. Participants were male and female. Two questionnaires were used in the study. Each questionnaire was given twice. The firstquestionnaire, which included question items about general attitudes towards writing was given before the first collaborative writing workshop as the pre-treatment questionnaire. The second, which had question items about attitudes towards collaborative writing was administered after the first collaborative writing workshop. The second questionnaire was given once more after the fourth collaborative writing workshop and the first questionnaire was administered as post-treatment at the end of the study. The whole data collection procedure lasted one month. Data were analyzed by t-test and correlation. T-test was used to see the significance of difference between the first and the fourth questionnaires; and also between the second and the third questionnaires. Correlation was used within the first and the fourth questionnaires to see the relationship between the attitudes towards writing in general and towards collaborative writing according to the responses to the question items about both types available in those two questionnaires. The results showed that before treatment the students at AUPS had negative attitudes towards writing and that they had not tried collaborative writing before. The results also indicated that negative attitudes towards writing turned into positive ones after the collaborative writing workshops. In addition the study results indicated that the positive change in attitudes is related to the collaborative writing. Another result of this study is that there is no significant difference between the two proficiency levels; upper-intermediate and advanced.