Improving Students Writing Through Collaboration Facilitated by Google

Docs

Carlos Lenin Álvarez Llerena1 Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, Hungría carlosa@student.elte.hu

Tatiana Cozzarelli Vásquez2 Universidad Casa Grande Guayaquil, Ecuador tcozzarelli@casagrande.edu.ec

Helen Gabriela Moreira Olives3 Universidad Nacional de Educación UNAE Azogues, Ecuador helen.moreira.olives@gmail.com

Gerald Alberto Yépez Jouvín2 Universidad Agraria del Ecuador Guayaquil, Ecuador geraldyepez@gmail.com

Keywords collaboration

Introduction transformed in order to focus on student-centered learning. Thus, the inner world, their emotions, feelings, and their motivation to have an active and participatory role in the language learning based on their need - tention to educational settings and focuses on learning outcomes in order to help develop students’ real-life abilities such as problem-solving skills and collaboration. performing collaborative activities in EFL contexts has provided positive - dents to expand their vocabulary and increase their writing and collaborative English skills. Consequently, current education is based on student-centered learning through the performance of hands-on assignments and the integration of various online learning tools that allow students to improve their English skills in collaborative learning settings. The mentioned studies have demonstrated the positive impact of connecting collaborative education and technology in the modern teaching-learning process. relevant aspects that involve collaborative learning facilitated by the application of technology in the EFL classrooms to enhance students’ speaking, listening, reading and writing skills. Hence, in order to explore this idea further, this study focused on the improvement of students’ collaborative writing skills through the application of Google Docs as the main technological tool. for peer-editing, revising, correcting, and providing authentic feedback on indicated that the application of Google Docs for writing purposes boosts classroom interaction by fostering critical thinking and active discussion that integrating Google Docs in educational contexts makes students feel more motivated to acquire knowledge and perceive the learning process more positively. Incidentally, upon examination of the existing literature the incorporation of Google Docs for educational purposes, demonstrating the need for research studies such as this one. is much information about the implementation of Google Docs as a technological resource in education, little research has been reported process of English as a Foreign Language of Ecuadorian high school students. This research discusses whether the students’ collaboration in writing through Google Docs could increase their writing skills and encourage them to use this tech-tool for educational purposes. The questions that guided this study are:

Nowadays, there are current studies that have shown the impor-tates the teaching, learning, and assessment of a second language and the learners’ individual and collaborative writing work.

2. Does the use of Google Docs motivate students’ collaborative performance in their English writing activities?

Literature Review

This section focused on providing deeper considerations of the principal concepts and terms related to this study. It includes relevant - tive Learning, Collaborative Writing, and Google Docs.

Collaborative learning

Collaboration is a philosophy of interaction where students are responsible for their learning actions by respecting the abilities and employed by instructors to facilitate learning and improve learner’s per- promote second language learners’ academic progress and learning motivation by providing a variety of opportunities to practice and enhance problem-solving, communication, and social skills.

In regards to the implementation of ICT for EFL collaborative learn- teaching promotes students’ collaborative learning. Thus, Avci and Adiguzel of engaging in the target language by performing collaborative work and authentic language activities based on a project-based learning approach. - rative teams provides meaningful experiences to students by sharing responsibilities, helping each other, and respecting members’ contributions. - tion problems, and some of them may not feel comfortable with the members assigned to their group. However, the researchers contend that groups need to be heterogeneous, purposefully, and carefully cho- claimed that there are social challenges, such as limited social interactions, gender bias, ICT reliance, and social norms conformance that technological tools because they do not have enough facilities to incorporate technology in their pedagogical instructions.

Collaborative writing

writing involves two or more people who work together to produce a that collaborative writing is a relevant skill to be developed in learn- writing is a system that associates semiotic, communicative, cognitive, and creative functions. Besides, collaborative writing helps students to be involved in constructing the meaning of the text based on content, structure, organization, and language by sharing ideas with peers, revis- that collaborative work in EFL writing is crucial to improve students’ writing components skills such as content, organization, grammar, vo- stages involved in the writing process in order to write various types of reading, revising, editing, and publishing. In the prewriting stage, the au- time to read, to build partner relationships, and the lack of technolo- though collaborative writing is considered a great strategy to improve learners’ skills, it is necessary to have spaces where teachers can reinforce students’ writing tasks. On this matter, Soltanpour and Valizadeh face-to-face negotiation in order to provide authentic feedback and reduce misunderstandings, errors, and mistakes with and by the students.

In the planning stage, participants check the ideas already generated and make sure they match the topic. Next, the drafting stage lets participants transform their ideas and planning into sentences. The pausing stage is a silent moment that helps participants examine what they have already written. The revising stage involves making changes to enhance the written text. In the editing stage, participants focus on sentence correctness. Finally, the publishing stage happens when the written text is ready to be shared with other people. There are some limitations to collaborative writing in classrooms.

Google Docs

From a technological perspective, several researchers hypothe-instruction and technology in the secondary classroom as a motivator to increase the amount of writing and allow students to give useful and nological tools such as Google Docs and Blogs as a way of enhancing ing students´ writing sub-skills such as collaborative writing, providing peer-feedback reviews, individual knowledge construction, creating infeatures that can be used to facilitate collaborative writing in foreign

Docs have three common applications as a word processor, a spreadsheet editor, and a presentation editor and viewer. These componentsallow students to plan, revise, and collaboratively edit documents. Gra- classroom environment where a document can be viewed, edited, and published by students or teachers.

Google Docs as an educational tool that allows learners to create and changes the students’ means of communication during collaborative writing since they can work together and learn from the other members of the group by using the internet and sharing ideas synchronously and established that Google Docs, as a technology-supported learning environment, helped EFL learners to become more motivated and en- nology in the learning process as a tool to increase learners’ animated feelings and to be aware of the positive probabilities to use these kinds of tech-tools in their instructions. technology to improve education worldwide, in Ecuador, according to is not adequately applied due to the persistent lack of computers, internet, and technological devices. Arguably, the limitations of using this kind explained that students who cannot use Google features and operations become discouraged from incorporating Google Docs in their learning. when applying Google Docs: namely, the arrangement of the members to each member of the group, and the concentration problems that students show when working in groups in a synchronic manner. for the possible failure in the use of some online technologies for educational purposes. Firstly, they agreed that socio-dynamic problems between group members are often the reason for the lack of success of group work in collaborative spaces. Secondly, they mentioned that even when collaborative tools can facilitate interaction, not all individuals or groups automatically possess the knowledge, attitudes, and sensibilities to work collaboratively. Consequently, researchers recommended that instructors provide detailed in-class demonstrations and examples to overcome Google Docs’ challenges.

Methodology

Design action research is a type of research where the quality of the relationship between members and researchers is utmost, and it takes place within a local situation and context and pursues to contribute to the development of the organization in that context. The data were collected from pre and post-questionnaires and pre- and post-performance tasks that - sults. To avoid subjectivity, two teachers from the school were assigned to score students’ pre and post-performance tasks.

The implementation of this innovation involves some ethical considerations. First, there was responsible conduct of this research with - in order to avoid bias from the teacher’s perspective towards students. Lastly, all the information obtained from this study was utilized by retheir participation and resources were acknowledged, and each contributor obtained their participation credit into the research.

Participants

The population assigned for this study was twenty-one EFL learn-

Docs but not for collaborative work. All participants were Spanish native them were at the A2 level according to the Common European FrameClassroom Proceduressisted of writing a travel magazine article as a group assignment with-providing feedback, accepting comments, and working together in the development of the performance task. According to McTighe and learned by transferring their understanding to new contexts.- vocabulary, parts and template of a travel magazine article, and touristic were arranged into seven groups of three. Each group had one hour toferred text editor to write in general. In this case, they used Microsoft Word. Students of each group had to work together to accomplish thelearning pursued and the evidence of such learnings, before thinking about the teaching instructions and learning activities to be applied. to Google Docs. They performed one assignment using this platform in order to become familiar with this tech-tool and its main features. Students were instructed on how to create texts, type on this platform, edit texts, provide comments, and resolve comments by exploring its different features. Moreover, students noticed that by using Google Docs, they could share their documents and that this platform automatically saves all of their changes. Subsequently, students were taught about to provide feedback when checking their peers’ documents. Group one had to check and provide feedback to the pre-performance task of group two, group two to group three, until group seven shared the document with group one. Students from each group had to provide

Then, they gave the pre-performance task back to the original group, and each group had to check the comments and feedback provided by their peers.

After students practiced how to use Google Docs, checked their peers’ documents, and provided authentic feedback to the pre-perfor- mance task, they were asked to perform in one hour the post-performance task, in the same groups. One member of the group had to create the document and send the link to the other two members of the group. At home, they had to work collaboratively to create and design the trav- them to the school to present each touristic place in the magazine to the whole class using PowerPoint presentations.

Instruments pre-questionnaire to know their demographic information and their exstated that questionnaires are research instruments to obtain necessary information such as age, sex, and other demographics or to gather more sophisticated data such as to measure emotions and perceptions of the participants. Thus, this pre-questionnaire was developed by using Google Forms, and it consisted of seven closed questions and one open question to obtain students’ demographics and their use of technology in the learning process.

Pre and post-performance tasks established the goal, role, audience, situation, performance, and standards where students could show

Hence, the pre and post-performance tasks were based on creating of a travel magazine article where students were travel advisors that had to plan a two-week tour to students from Cambridge university to three - dents in groups without using any tech-tool, while the post-performance task was done by working collaboratively and using Google Docs.

A rubric was applied to evaluate the pre and post-performance collaborative writing improve when using Google Docs? Menendez-Va- tional resources that support students to identify the criteria of the objects assessed. Hence, the rubric of this study contains the following main components: Ideas, Language Use, Layout, and Final Product. By using the rubric, numerical data was obtained to compare the results from the pre and post-performance tasks. The highest grade of each

Finally, a post-questionnaire was administered after the presentation of the post-performance task in order to answer the second research question: Does the use of Google Docs motivate students’ collaborative performance in their English writing activities? This questionnaire aimed to provide evidence about students’ motivation to in- developed by using Survey Monkey, and it included ten Likert scale questions, which students answered by choosing the best option ac-

Data Analysis

In order to analyze and interpret the data collected, the Statistics Package for the Social Studies SPSS was applied. Each criterion was labeled and coded to create variables to upload the information in this software. After creating the tables with the variables assigned, the software was run to get results from descriptive statistics such as maximum, minimum, mean, and standard deviation. Results from the pre and post-performance tasks were analyzed based on the established rubric and considering each criteria of the rubric. Moreover, the post-survey was analyzed question by question that provided information of the students’ perceptions after working collaboratively and using Google Docs. The reliability of the questionnaires was given by Cronbach’s Alpha. Finally, in order to obtain histograms and graphical results, the tools from Survey Monkey, and Google Forms were applied.

Results when using Google Docs collaboratively?”, the results obtained from the pre and post-performance tasks are the following: pre-performance and the post-performance task, respectively. The results indicate that there was an improvement in writing achievement in terms of language use, the cohesion of ideas, layout, and organization of the post-performance task.

Regarding language use criteria, there was a total increment of provides a result of Cohen’s d on learning, but it cannot be generalized due to the small number of participants in this research.

Strongly Agree

Neither Agree or Disagree

Agree

Disagree

Results from the pre-questionnaire indicated that all the participants think that applying technology is productive for the English learning process. Most of the students indicated that technology helps them all students did not have any experience in the use of Google Docs as a tech-tool to learn. Even though all of them have a Google account, only

Docs motivate students’ collaborative performance in their English writing activities?” A post-survey was conducted in this study. After scrutiny,

254 research series for teachers: Pedagogical Innovations facilitated by ICT in the classroom that they would apply Google Docs to perform academic assignments in the future. that Google Docs is a useful tool for learning how to write magazine applying Google Docs they had the opportunity to learn some English grammar and mechanics by working collaboratively, sharing documents to be checked, and providing feedback based on rubrics. Furthermore, when applying Google Docs in order to develop their performance task collaboratively. performed very well in their post-performance task when applying Goo- participants showed a positive attitude and motivation towards the integration of Google Docs in their collaborative writing activities. Finally, students stated their intention to continue using Google Docs in future academic assignments as well as when they have to work in collaborative writing.

Discussion - ogy and collaborative work in EFL settings to increase students’ Englishto perform writing activities, inside and outside of the classroom. most of the students did not have experience with Google Docs before, task. They were responsible for accomplishing the requirements of the indicated that collaboration involves interaction where students are responsible for their learning actions, contribute with their peers, and respect their contributions. Results based on rubrics showed that when students worked in groups, they obtained better scores than when they worked alone. Into the four criteria established on the rubric, students showed an increment in the scores based on their collaborative writing skills: mainly in terms of layout and organization, students increment supported this statement since, according to his research, Google Docs is a useful tool for collaborative learning and collaborative writing where students showed improvements in their learning experiences compared to performing assignments without using Google Docs.

According to the second research question, this study has shown that overall, students agreed that they enjoyed and felt motivated when using Google Docs collaboratively. Besides, most students stated that they would apply this tech-tool to carry out academic assignments in indicated that, based on their study, participants have positive percep- tion on writing assignments. They explained that students have these positive perceptions because Google Docs is an accessible ICT to use, and it allows students to have real and authentic communication by sharing ideas and comments between them. search. According to the results, Google Docs is a technological tool that helps students to improve their collaborative writing skills, as well dents indicated they felt comfortable and motivated to write their travel magazine articles and to improve it by receiving their classmates’ feed- nology is a motivator in secondary classrooms.

On the other hand, during the implementation of this study, there were some inconveniences, such as assigning groups to work togeth- that the arrangement of the members of the group according to their English levels and empathy, the assignment of roles to each member of the group, and the concentration problems that students show when working in groups are the three main inconveniences when applying Google Docs.

Conclusions

The present research studied how students can improve their collaborative writing skills through the support of Google Docs as a technological resource. It involved the comparison of two performing writing tasks developed by students in the classroom, as well as online. Results - cant improvement between the pre and post-performance tasks since they could collaborate in groups by using Google Docs to provide feed-

Furthermore, the post-performance task showed improvement over the pre-performance task in all the criteria aspects from the rubric, results demonstrate that collaborative work helped participants to improve their documents by sharing their thoughts, interacting, and learning from one another. Besides, EFL students have positive perspectives activities. The majority of student’s responses indicated that they enjoyed applying Google Docs while writing their performing task. They also indicated that they felt comfortable when receiving feedback from technological resource for future assignments.

Consequently, Google Docs is a useful technological resource that motivates students to improve their writing skills collaboratively. Being an online resource, students could collaboratively interact with each other to improve their travel magazine article, thus to improve their language skills.

Recommendations

Some recommendations that could be addressed to strengthen reliability in future studies are related to increasing the number of items in the questionnaire. Moreover, an interview must be administered to collect more factual information about students’ motivation and perceptions towards the use of Google Docs in their writing activities. It is essential to work with current computers and with a fast internet connection to encourage students to invest their time in performing their collaborative writing activities and not in other technical issues such as checking in- have more hours of instruction in order to avoid student problems when pre-activities to gain knowledge about the established topic.

Limitations

The limitations when conducting this study were mainly based on the students’ limited access to technology, the lack of school resources, little time to carry out the innovation, and possible teacher’s subjectivity. - cially in public schools, is the lack of current technology. Some computers worked very slowly, and some of them had viruses. Likewise, the speed of the internet connection at the high school impeded incorpo-

Some students reported that there were some inconveniences when using Google Docs. They indicated that even though they liked - corporate some characteristics in order to improve the design of the travel magazine article. The last limitation is the number of participants in this this study. The results obtained cannot be applied in a general perspective. Also, the result will vary according to the ICT competencies that students have and their perspectives towards the implementation of technology in their assignments.

EFL research series for teachers: Pedagogical Innovations facilitated by ICT in the classroom

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