Development of a Synchronous Collaborative Writing Revision Instrument for Teaching English

Collaborative writing, one of the methodological innovations for language teaching, is "the social act of creating a single, coordinate document with two or more participants". Revision is the last process for writing. Corrective feedback and error correction, critical tasks for revision, are important for English as a Second Language/English as a Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) writing instruction. Research findings showed that students' major difficulty in error correction lies in their failure to detect errors. Also, researchers proposed that error analysis can be reinvented in the form of computer-aided error analysis, a new type of computer corpus annotation. Annotations on digital documents can be easily shared among groups of people, making them valuable for a wide variety of tasks, including providing feedback. Collaborative corrective feedback and error correction with asynchronous annotation systems have been developed by researchers. It is suggested that collaborative teams can be enhanced by applying collaboration in a synchronous environment. However, few synchronous annotation systems are developed for corrective feedback and error correction. This study developed a web-based online synchronous collaborative writing revision instrument for collaborative writing revision. With this system, users can collaboratively make corrective feedback and error corrections on digitized documents in a synchronous environment. It is implemented on the general web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, with online annotations in the same way as the traditional paper-based correction approach.  Another innovative functionality developed in this system is that the user can freely switch between the annotation mode and the review mode to neatly review the "right" article after correction without showing the correction marks to reduce the problem of cognitive overload.