EXPERIMENTING WITH ENGLISH COLLABORATIVE
WRITING ON GOOGLE SITES
Nicole Tavares and Samuel Chu
Faculty of Education, The University of Hong Kong,
Centre for Information Technology in Education, Pokfulam, Hong Kong
Keywords: Collaborative Learning, English Writing, Primary Schools, Google Sites, Wikis, Hong Kong.
Abstract: A considerable amount of research in recent years has shown the advantages of integrating Web 2.0
technologies with language teaching. Specifically, this paper will shed light on the positive effects of
web-based collaborative writing on Google Sites based on a project carried out in four primary schools in
Hong Kong, as revealed by the qualitative data samples of students’ and teachers’ comments and revisions,
as well as the result of focus group interviews. Both students’ and teachers’ revisions and feedback not only
endorse but also expand on the benefits of using Google Sites in the linguistic, discourse and motivational
domains for students as suggested by previous research findings. Key observations based on the present
study will also be highlighted to offer insights into ways of merging Web 2.0 technologies and language
teaching in a second or foreign language context like that of Hong Kong.
1 INTRODUCTION
Writing has always been a challenge to students
learning a second or foreign language, not to
mention young learners in a primary school context.
While acknowledging the fruitful results of using
web-based collaborative tools in promoting writing
in group projects across different subjects (Woo et
al., 2011), this study aims to examine the extent to
which collaborative learning in a Web 2.0
environment can enhance students’ writing abilities
in English. Web 2.0 technologies have been
increasingly perceived by teachers, parents and the
general public as an essential tool for equipping
students with the necessary skills, such as
communication and collaboration skills, required in
the 21
st
century (Zammit, 2010). Google Sites is also
believed to provide students with a free online
collaborative platform to co-construct their group
projects — an avenue that enables teachers to
engineer discussions that activate students to see
each other as resources and owners of their own
learning, to monitor their learning progress and to
provide timely feedback that moves them forward
(Wiliam, 2005).
This paper will highlight the literature guiding
the design of the study, discuss the intervention
program prior to and during the project, outline the
data collection methods, report on the main findings,
and raise issues for critical reflection.
2 LITERATURE REVIEW
New technologies have been found to have a
tremendous impact on the teaching and learning of
English writing in the last few decades (Goldberg et
al., 2003). Many studies have started to bring in the
application of Web 2.0 in education involving
collaborative tools called wikis (Woo et al., 2011).
Hossain and Aydin (2011) have suggested that social
networking applications such as blogs, forums,
podcasts and wikis are successful in creating a
collaborative virtual society for users to share
information interactively. Google Sites, a kind of
wiki, is a “collaborative web space where anyone
can add content and anyone can edit content that has
already been published” (Richardson, 2006, p. 8).
A considerable number of studies in the past
decade has pointed out specific benefits of Google
Sites and other similar wikis. First of all, such form
of technology can promote social and achievement
motivation. The interactive and read-write nature of
Web 2.0 technologies facilitates users’ participation
in and building of many rich and user-centered
virtual communities (Alexander, 2006). What’s
more, providing a genuine audience to the
217
Tavares N. and Chu S..
EXPERIMENTING WITH ENGLISH COLLABORATIVE WRITING ON GOOGLE SITES.
DOI: 10.5220/0003924502170222
In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Computer Supported Education (CSEDU-2012), pages 217-222
ISBN: 978-989-8565-06-8
Copyright
c
2012 SCITEPRESS (Science and Technology Publications, Lda.)
participants motivates them become more engaged
writers (Lo & Hyland, 2007). With this, they are
likely to get more actively involved in the co-writing
process (Parker & Chao, 2007) and in their own
knowledge construction (Boulos et al., 2006).
Apart from igniting students’ motivation to be
involved in the writing process, Google Sites also
offers a convenient context for them to contribute in
various ways. Hossain and Aydin (2011) indicated
that wikis allow users to have different levels of
access to edit or delete content. Students can play a
part according to their availability as well as their
ability. This study provides solid evidence of this in
Section 4 of the paper.
Most recently, Woo et al. (2009) conducted a
study to explore the challenges and benefits that a
wiki may bring to the students and teachers in a
primary five English class in Hong Kong. The
results showed that the students held a positive
attitude towards both the process and the product of
the collaborative writing experience. A follow-up
investigation done by Woo et al. (2011) on students
of the same age group has reconfirmed previous
findings that students enjoy using the wiki and that it
had a significant impact on their collaboration and
writing skills development. Although these two
studies and a few others (e.g., Wheeler et al., 2008)
have generated encouraging results in the use of
wikis to facilitate primary students’ writing and
revision of their texts, no larger scale projects have
been carried out in Hong Kong with students of
different ability groups in primary schools across the
territory to investigate the value of using Web 2.0
technologies in English language learning. This
paper therefore aims to bridge these research gaps
by describing the effects of using Google Sites for
collaborative English writing online with examples
of students’ work from four local primary schools.
The divergence in the approach adopted by the
teachers in the four schools in monitoring their
students online is nevertheless beyond the scope of
this discussion here.
3 RESEARCH METHOD
3.1 Participants
Four primary schools located in different parts of
Hong Kong, including KF, SH, CP and WS
1
, were
1
KF = CCC Kei Faat Primary School; SH = Cheung Chau Sacred Heart
School; CP = Canossa Primary School; WS = STFA Wu Siu Kui Memorial
Primary School (a.m.). The population in these four schools should reflect
the language performance of upper primary students in the higher, average
and lower range across the territory.
invited to participate in this project so as to ensure
that a sufficient quantity of student writings
representative of those of the average local primary
student population could be gathered to examine the
effects of online collaborative writing in English.
The 401 Primary five students who took part in the
study were first required to do at least one
collaborative piece of writing on paper in the first
term (Phase One) to experience writing as a team
and to be acquainted with peer evaluation, a part of
the intervention program to be discussed in 3.2. In
the second term (Phase Two of the study), students
completed their writing on Google Sites. The four
schools differed in terms of the number of classes
involved, the composition topic as well as the
duration and details of their implementation plan. At
KF, for example, two classes took part in the study
and their writing topic was Our Weekend Activities.
Similarly, two classes from SH joined the study with
Cheung Chau Bun Festival as their theme. CP had
Lost as their topic while WS chose Good Person,
Good Deeds; both CP and WS had a larger number
of students taking part in the study. It is worth noting
that all the topics were closely relevant to the
students’ daily life, school activities and lesson
focus.
3.2 Intervention Program
Teachers facilitated students’ writing in a
pen-and-paper format in the first phase and then via
Google Sites in Phase Two. Pre- and
while-intervention professional development
workshops were held and teachers from the four
participating schools took part. Two pre-intervention
workshops were organized prior to the
commencement of the study and designed to deepen
the teachers’ understanding of the potential benefits
of process and collaborative writing using White and
Ardnt’s (1991) model that illustrates the cyclical and
developmental nature of the writing process as
shown below. (See Figure 1)
Figure 1: (White & Ardnt, 1991, p. 4).
At the workshops, the teachers’ knowledge of the
writing process, approaches to the teaching of
writing, their role in facilitating learning and the
CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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giving of quality feedback was strengthened. In
particular, the teachers were reminded of the
importance of having a clear set of assessment
criteria and ways of guiding their students in
interpreting the criteria and evaluating one another’s
written work with the help of different evaluation
templates. The workshop organized during the
intervention provided the opportunity for the
teachers from the four schools to come together
again to share and reflect on their experience of their
try-outs in Phase One, to compare the evaluation
templates they used and the impact on the quality of
students’ written work, to voice their concerns and to
collectively plan ahead for Phase Two. What was
notable about this while-intervention workshop was
that teachers received feedback on the comments
they made on their students’ work, discussed the
impact of their use of prompts, questions,
suggestions and revisions in different forms, and
explored how they could maximize the benefits of
their strategy use.
3.3 Data Collection
3.3.1 Focus Group Interviews with Teachers
and Students
Focus group interviews were conducted on 42
students and 19 teachers from the four participating
schools to gather their opinions on the use of Google
Sites. In general, the majority held a positive attitude
towards Google Sites as a collaborative writing
platform. Some interesting qualitative findings are
captured in Section 4 of the paper.
3.3.2 Documentary Analysis of the Students'
Progress
Google Sites has the function of ‘page history’ that
generates information on the person making the
revisions and identifies the types of revisions done,
thereby enabling one to trace how different kinds of
peer and teacher feedback lead to the latest version
of students’ work. Qualitative data was thus
gathered and analyzed through multiple sources of
evidence, including students’ first drafts, peer
evaluation of their writing from their group mates
and classmates depending on the accessibility of
their writing to everyone in class as determined by
the teachers, information edited as recorded in the
wiki history page and a comparison of this with the
revised texts posted on Google Sites. The analysis
revealed benefits for students of different ability
groups and this is documented below.
4 FINDINGS AND DISCUSSION
4.1 Positive Pressure to Write
Throughout Phase Two of the study, when writing
was all done on Google Sites, it was observed that
there were fewer instances of non-starters, compared
to writing in the pen-and-paper format. As
exemplified in the online exchanges below from a
class of students in CP, the candid and innocent
responses from students such as “was your writing
eaten by yourself ?” served as a powerful socially
motivating factor in encouraging their friends to at
least begin to write:
Figure 2: Sample one.
Another comment “You are very lazy” by a
classmate was also proven to be more persuasive
than a similar remark made by the teacher as it came
in a more timely fashion on Google Sites than it
would on paper and was made public to everyone in
the class.
4.2 Writing for a Real Audience
Students generally valued Google Sites as an avenue
for mutual exchange, peer learning and publication
of their work. Comparing this to the pen-and-paper
mode they experienced in an earlier phase of the
study, two students had the following views: “When
we use Google Sites, we have the chance to read the
compositions from other classes, comment on our
classmates’ work and exchange ideas. When we did
our work on paper, we could only read a few pieces
of writing.” “Google Sites allows other people to
comment on our work and we can learn more from
that.” Interestingly, a third student shared the pride
he took in having the opportunity to publish his
work: “… we can save our work easily on Google
Sites and show it to others.”
4.3 Better Writing and Peer Learning
It is precisely because of the communicative nature
of this collaborative writing platform that students
have demonstrated their interest in commenting on
not only the orthographic, grammatical and syntactic
aspects of their peers’ writing but also, much more
importantly, its content.
While some linguistically more advanced
students were seen making detailed suggestions for
EXPERIMENTINGWITHENGLISHCOLLABORATIVEWRITINGONGOOGLESITES
219
their peers on spelling, tenses and the use of
conjunctions as indicated below,
Figure 3: Sample two.
their not-so-strong counterparts
2
left comments such
as
Figure 4: Sample three.
which had an equally positive influence on their
peers’ revisions as shown in their edited work. The
communicativeness of such exchanges is further
evidenced through responses to the comments above
and actions taken by students:
Figure 5: Sample four.
Even more impressive were nevertheless the
questions that students raised which led their
classmates to reflect on and revise their writing on
the content level. For example, one student noticed a
classmate writing a story about The Big Buddha in
Tai Mo Shan and posed the following two questions
for him
3
:
Figure 6: Sample five.
Other examples of comments of this nature
include:
Figure 7: Sample six.
These friendly but stimulating and provoking
questions, plus helpful prompts such as
Figure 8: Sample seven.
2
The students were classified as high, average and low performers in the
English language by their teachers according to their official results in
school.
3
Geographically, The Big Buddha is situated on Lantau Island in Hong
Kong and not Tai Mo Shan.
in response to a writer who brought his composition
to a close with the following sentence
Figure 9: Sample eight.
gave their fellow students useful pointers to revise
their work by further developing their ideas,
enriching the content of their writing and fixing
problems with relevance for overall greater logical
and textual coherence
4
. This not only supports the
argument put forward by Woo et al. (2009) that
primary students have the ability to comment on
their peers’ work but even takes it further to prove
that they are capable of reviewing one another’s
writing in different dimensions, given appropriate
guidance from the teacher.
There were also concrete examples of peer
learning and peer tutoring at work from the average
to lower performers as identified by their teachers.
In the following instance, a student was noted
reading another group’s piece of writing and, in his
eagerness to understand its content, tried to find out
what “truthful” means and got this reply:
Figure 10: Sample nine.
Overall, both teachers and students were found
giving encouraging feedback on ideas as well as
language use as shown in some of the examples
cited above and in this interaction between four
students and the target writer:
Figure 11: Sample ten.
All this is reinforced by the students’ perceptions
as expressed in focus group interviews that “Google
Sites allows other people to comment on (their)
work and (so they) can learn more from that” and
teachers’ beliefs that this collaborative environment
offers the advantage of “promot(ing) the writing
skills of a group of students – not just one”. What is
4
There were ample examples of this from the ‘page history’ and improved
versions of students’ work based on their classmates’ feedback which
unfortunately the limited space in this paper does not allow us to show.
CSEDU2012-4thInternationalConferenceonComputerSupportedEducation
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worth highlighting too is that the students were in
general writing more than they would otherwise
have produced in a pen-and-paper format, and were
communicating most of the time in the target
language – English – in natural, spontaneous and
anxiety-free ways.
4.4 Teachers’ Role in the Collaborative
Writing Process
Teachers’ roles can be conceptualized as being
three-fold in the process of guiding their students in
completing the collaborative writing task: (i) as “a
genuine and interested reader” (White & Ardnt,
1991, p. 125) who responded naturally to the content
of students’ writing as Ms Cheng from KF below
attempts to achieve.
Figure 12: Sample eleven.
(ii) as facilitator in helping students strengthen the
quality of their ideas as Ms Cheng does above with
her suggestion “You can describe the appearance of
(your) mum, how hard-working she is, how good
she is” or as another teacher Ms Kwok from KF
does through the use of questions:
Figure 13: Sample twelve.
and (iii) as language assistant (Tribble, 1996, p. 119)
as a teacher from WS Ms Lam illustrates via her
prompts and guidance given to a student on his
grammatical mistakes:
Figure 14: Sample thirteen.
4.5 Benefits of Google Sites in Itself
Overall students found the experience of writing on
Google Sites rewarding. Endorsing a teacher’s view
that “(a)ll students have the right to evaluate other
groups’ work and later the groups share their work
with the other class and comment on it” and that
students “learn to appreciate others’ work and ideas”,
here are some student voices: “If there are some
words we don’t know how to spell, we can look them
up in the dictionary immediately by using the
computer.”“Using the computer greatly arouses my
interest in writing in English.”
The word-search, spell-check and translation
options made available to students via Google Sites
have made them find “working online more
convenient” and the editing process less
cumbersome, giving them “the motivation to
accomplish tasks” not in their mother tongue.
5 TEACHING IMPLICATIONS
AND CONCLUSIONS
Indeed, “(o)ne can get close to perfection through
producing, reflecting on, discussing, and reworking
successive drafts or a text” (Nunan, 1991). There is
no doubt that self-reflection and peer evaluation
have the potential of giving students extensive
practice in developing the skills necessary for
editing and revising their work before it reaches
‘perfection’ (Witbeck, 1976). We have seen from the
online exchanges cited in this paper how students of
varying abilities took part in and benefitted from the
use of Web 2.0 technologies. Yet there is still room
to learn from the more successful implementations at
different schools based on the observations of the
researchers. It is in this light that some
recommendations for the use of such technologies
are to be made.
Throughout the study, it was observed that
schools and teachers that opened up the online
platform for students to post their work as early in
the writing process as possible created greater
opportunities for students to receive feedback from
their teachers and peers. These students were also
found making more thorough and advanced
revisions on the content, organization and language
of their writing. This suggests the need for teachers
to help students view Google Sites or similar online
writing environments as a risk-taking and supportive
avenue for them to experiment with language use
while not being afraid of showing their mistakes to
and learning from as well as with one another.
Teachers who were identified to have succeeded
in stretching their students’ potential more fully were
ones who grasped the chance to make use of student
comments such as “Too short!” or “Very long!” to
guide them in discovering how they could better
develop their ideas or learn from other students to
make their writing richer in content and more
coherent. The quality of these teachers’ feedback
was also notable.
The environments found to be more conducive to
constructive and specific feedback from students
were also ones where the teachers were more
EXPERIMENTINGWITHENGLISHCOLLABORATIVEWRITINGONGOOGLESITES
221
tolerant of students’ use of their first language (L1).
What one may wish to question is whether or not
there should be an insistence on an all-English
interaction at the expense of non-communication or
whether teachers should acknowledge students’
relevant contributions in L1 and then guide them in
gradually using more of the target language. After all,
aren’t words of praise like “ 勁 !” (meaning
“Brilliant!”) as quoted in Figure 11 more reinforcing
in the students’ L1? Shouldn’t concepts which may
be difficult to express, such as the idea of indenting
the paragraph from the first suggestion below, be
encouraged?
Figure 15: Sample fourteen.
All in all, the primary students who took part in
the study generally enjoyed using Google Sites,
experienced the linguistic, discourse-related and
motivational benefits of using the online platform to
practise their writing, evaluate their peers’ work and
learn from one another. What merits further and
more in-depth investigation is nonetheless individual
teachers’ management of the web-based
collaborative platform, their strategy use in
facilitating peer interaction, their approach to
feedback and their tolerance of the use of L1.
As Engstrom and Jewett (2005) assert, the
effectiveness of wiki application in learning and
teaching depends on “careful planning and training
of both students and instructors to familiarize them
with the technology”. A systematic approach
coupled with a pedagogically informed plan is of
vital importance to the successful integration of this
technology into the curriculum of any second or
foreign language.
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