CRITICAL READING 2

REVIEW OF JOURNAL entitled ‘Individual and Collaborative Planning Conditions: Effects of Fluency, Complexity and Accuracy in L2 Argumentative Writing’ 

By M. Tavakoli and M. Rezazadeh (2014), University of Isfahan

There are three fundamental dimensions of second language (L2) writing, namely, (a) features of the texts that people produce, it is examining L2 writing improvement in terms of complexity, fluency, and accuracy; (b) the composing process that people use while they write, it is organized into planning, formulating, and revising; and (c) the sociocultural contexts, it is aimed to investigate the effects of individual and collaborative planned conditions.

Students used planning time to organize what they were going to say. Whatever was happening in the collaborative and individual planning did not affect the complexity of the learners’ compositions. Fluency was measured with regard to average number of words and clauses per-text. The result is that fluency is significantly advantaged for individual planning. The learners in the collaborative planned condition had positive effects of accuracy on content, organization, and vocabulary, because the interaction can improve grammatical performance.

 According to Vygotsky, cognitive processes arise from the interaction that occurs between individuals. Students collaboratively construct knowledge when working together on the pre-task sheet. Collaborative planning can provide opportunities for students to conceptualize a variety of other people’s viewpoints. However, individual planning may limit the learners’ ideas, and make them write more detailed and length compositions. It is indicated that collaborative planning promoted more accurate textual output, while individual planning resulted in greater fluency, and both types of planned conditions benefited the complexity.

The implication is that writing after the individual planning might have enabled learners to generate longer texts which need to be revised later for better quality essays. Therefore, teacher may give the individual planners an extra time for revising the text after the completion of the task. In the other hand, if the teachers want to operate the classroom into groups for the collaborative group planning, the students should be composed in mixed qualification. This is related to the concept of scaffolding which the role of a more capable peer in assisting the other to solve problems in the zone of proximal development as described by Vygotsky.