Exploring immediate and prolonged effects of collaborative writing on young learners’ texts: L2 versus FL

Abstract Context or the teaching/learning environment has only recently been recognized as a mediating variable in L2/FL written performance. These studies are multisite and have not yet targeted another feature of context: the sociolinguistic status of the target language. Likewise, scarce research exists examining the prolonged effects of collaboration. The present classroom-based study fills this void by investigating the effects of collaboration on the (a) jointly written texts; (b) subsequent individual texts; and (c) texts written in two distinct sociolinguistic status target languages of two groups of 11–12-year-old Spanish primary education students. Distributed into a control (CG) (N = 17) and an experimental group (EG) (N = 10 pairs), they wrote three descriptive texts in each language, L2 Basque and FL English: the first and third individually and the second one individually by the CG and in pairs by the EG. The texts were examined qualitatively with a rubric and quantitatively for fluency and accuracy measures. Immediate and prolonged effects of collaboration were observed on accuracy, while fluency decreased and global qualitative scores varied very little. Additionally, unlike in the CG, language-dependent differences were not attested in the EG which suggests that collaborative writing is an expedient tool to increase attention to language and limit the mediating effects of the learning context.