Feedback-Mediated Individual and Collaborative Planning: Effects on Structural Organization and Clarity of Argumentative Essays

Volume 8 Issue 2 April - June 2018

Research Paper

Feedback-Mediated Individual and Collaborative Planning: Effects on Structural Organization and Clarity of Argumentative Essays

Fatemeh Soltanpour* , Mohammadreza Valizadeh **, Fatemeh Ghafarianzirak ***

* University Lecturer, Department of English, Kar Higher Education Institute, Qazvin, Iran

** Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English, Faculty of Foreign Languages, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey.

*** Department of English Language, Payame Noor University, Tehran, Iran.

Soltanpour, F., Valizadeh , M., and Ghafarianzirak, F. (2018). Feedback-Mediated Individual and Collaborative Planning: Effects on Structural Organization and Clarity of Argumentative Essays. i-manager’s Journal on English Language Teaching, 8(2), 14-26. https://doi.org/10.26634/jelt.8.2.14586

Abstract

This two-week quantitative experimental study aimed at making a comparison among the effects of individual and collaborative pre-task planning, both with and without receiving teacher feedback on structural organization and clarity of argumentative essays. The participants were 120 Iranian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, assigned randomly to five groups (four experimental and one control, with no planning condition). They were given 10 minutes for planning as a pre-writing activity. The individual group did the planning individually, while the collaborative one did it through peer-interaction. There were two more individual and collaborative groups, who also received the teacher feedback during the planning process. The other writing tasks processes were done individually in all groups and in 30 minutes. The results revealed that the four experimental groups outperformed the control one. The collaborative group was significantly better than the individual one, but the two groups who received the teacher feedback had superiority over the others. The findings, which are in line with the social constructivist view of learning, also corroborate the results of previous relevant research papers. Additionally, the findings can be enlightening; the L2 writing teachers can apply the techniques utilized in this research in their classes, and hopefully obtain beneficial results.