The Nature of Collaborative Writing Technique

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B. Concept of Collaborative Writing Technique

1. The Nature of Collaborative Writing Technique

Collaborative writing technique has been a trend in composition research and pedagogy since the 1970s. A great deal of attention began being focused on collaborative writing in early 1970’s when English and composition professor, Kenneth Bruffee, began arguing that by having students write essays and fiction in groups, students produced better work than when they worked alone. He argued that students learned more through group work than when they interacted only with their teacher Spring, 1997: 2. It is also inspirited by psychologist, Vygotsky, 1896-1934 citied by Kellough and Kellough, 1999: 302 studying the importance of a learner’s social interactions in learning situations. Vygotsky argued that learning is most effective when learners cooperate with one another in a supportive learning environment under careful guidance of a teacher. Murray 1992: 100 states that collaborative writing is essentially a social process through which writers looked for areas of shared understanding. To reach such an understanding, participants function according to several social and interactional rules as follows: First, the participants discuss the goals which they are going to write. They place the goals in rank order from high to low, and then they share a higher order goal. From the sharing, they set a common goal for the group. Meanwhile, specification of the goal is negotiated during the process. Secondly, the participants must have different knowledge and there must be a gap information between them. Because of this information gap, they group members have to negotiate content, style, and even the goal of writing. Thirdly, commit to user the participants interact as a group. They exchange thought, feeling, ideas between them, and result in reciprocal effect on each other. Fourthly, the participants distanced themselves from the text. To see their collaborative text, they produce many written drafts during one session and they move away from the text in time and space. Setting the text aside for a time will make them have a new perspective to find their mistakes in the text. In addition, Chin 1996: 5 asserts that collaborative writing is an area where group ware may provide significant benefit. It allows students to simultaneously work on different portions of the same document andor to review and critique the written work of others. It is clear that collaborative refers to a writing group but there are as many ways to write in group as there are combinations of individual. Accordingly, Frakas 1991 citied by Spring, 1997: 1 offers four possible definitions useful in approaching collaboration through an analysis of process, they are: 1. Two or more people jointly composing the complete text of a document; 2. Two or more people contributing components to a document; 3. One or more person modifying, by editing andor reviewing, the document of one or more persons; 4. One person working interactively with one or more person and drafting a document based on their ideas of the person or persons. By breaking the common-sensical concept of group-based writing into a four distinct types of work, Farkas’s definitions paint a picture of what is, and what is not collaboration. From the points of view above, it can be concluded that collaborative writing is the process of producing a written work as a group where all members commit to user contributed to the content, style, and even the goal of writing and also the decisions how the group will function.

2. The Implementation of Collaborative Writing Technique