Relay Writing Tasks in the EFL Classroom: When Second Language Learning Encounters Collaborative Interactions

Abstract

This study presents how EFL learners benefit from the classroom relay writing as a pre-activity in collaborative writing tasks that involve various simultaneously collaborative interactions. An intact 42-student class of freshmen majoring in accounting is divided into four groups. Each group is assigned with a relay writing task with the first sentence available only. The sequential writer of each group writes while checking the previous single sentence. Each group accomplish the task by three steps: individually independent sentence relay writing, in-group text reading, adjusting and reshaping, and between-group text appreciation and evaluation. The composition process is audiotaped and all texts (including both the first and final drafts) are collected and analyzed. And a random interview is followed. The data showed that 1) the writing turned out to be more vivid and inspiring when the participants only know the first sentence and the final drafts appeared in a more logic way with less grammatical and lexical errors, indicating the powerful effect of dialogues between group writers; 2) it could be even more successful when there is a relay writing task as a pre-activity as each individual was assured to make contributions to this writing task no matter how passive or subservient he/she is when involved in a group task; 3) The collaborative writing could be more fulfilling when there were initiator-participants scaffolding the whole task. Furthermore, by observing the accuracy and fluency of the written texts, the pedagogical implications of simultaneous in-group and between-group interactions are illustrated.