A theoretically-grounded classification of EFL children’s formulation strategies in collaborative writing

Research into collaborative writing (CW) has drawn on the notion of “languaging”, operationalized as language-related episodes (LREs), to account for the way learners pool their ideational and linguistic resources, give and receive immediate feedback on language and, as a result, deepen their awareness of meaning-form mappings. LREs in CW have been examined from different perspectives, including the degree of noticing shown by learners, the extent of their involvement in the interaction, the knowledge sources drawn upon, or the cognitive processes deployed to solve their linguistic problems. Yet, in spite of the alleged “added value” that strategic behaviour brings to learners’ reflection on language, available research on CW has not yet looked at LREs from the perspective of formulation strategies, i.e., the conscious mental actions engaged in by writers to address the problems involved in the transformation of ideas into written language. In an attempt to address this gap, and to extend available, but sill limited, CW research with children, the interactions of 30 young EFL pairs while writing two narrative picture-story texts were analysed by means of a reconceptualization of LREs as problem-solving strategy clusters, i.e., chains of strategies activated and applied to the writer’s linguistic knowledge in the course of the activity. The outcome of these analyses is a theoretically-motivated and pedagogically useful, child-based taxonomy of collaborative formulation strategies, which can help raise awareness of the mechanisms involved in solving language-related problems in early EFL writing, thereby promoting more tailored writing instruction and learners’ self-regulation. The taxonomy is also presented as a point of departure for future research.