WRITING IN THE CLASSROOM: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN COLLABORATIVE AND INDIVIDUAL WRITING SITUATIONS WITH BOYS AND GIRLS
Submitted by:
Cristina Felipeto
Abstract:
Collaborative writing for classroom dyads is a didactic situation that places students dialoguing to build a single text through negotiation, unlike individual writing, where one usually writes alone and in silence. Affiliated to the studies proposed by Textual Genetics (Grésillon, 1994), based on an enunciative approach (Benveniste, 1988, 2006), the objective of this work was to develop a comparative study between texts produced individually and collaboratively by the same students. The study sample was defined by convenience and comprises 8 manuscripts, 4 of which are individually produced and 4 are produced in pairs. The students are in the 2nd year of elementary school in Brazil, with ages between 7 and 8 years, being a pair of boys and another pair of girls. The data were collected respecting the ecological conditions of the school context. Three categories served as analytical parameters: A - the number of words, to verify in which situation larger texts are produced; B - the incidence of orthographic errors, crossing it with the presence / absence of the collaborator's eye; C- the gender variable. Analyzes have shown that, collaboratively, students write, on average, texts 55% longer than individually. If the dialogue is inherent in collaborative writing and if students spend much of the time talking to write, why are the texts bigger when written collaboratively? We also found significant differences between female and male writing: girls write texts 41% longer than boys. However, in an individual situation, girls write texts about 12% longer than boys. Would the generation of ideas be more productive in pairs, what would lead students to write more in this situation?
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