Model texts in collaborative and individual writing among EFL children: noticing, incorporations, and draft quality

Abstract

When written corrective feedback is provided via model texts, language learners notice and incorporate features from the models into their subsequent writings. However, little is known about the accuracy of these incorporations or about the impact of model texts on draft quality. Also, model texts have often been implemented with children working in pairs but, to date, studies including individual and collaborative conditions are extremely scarce. This study examines the impact of model texts among 33 EFL children (aged 11–12) divided into a pair (N = 22) and an individual (N = 11) group. Our findings do not reveal any significant differences between pairs and individuals. The students in both conditions noticed features, mainly lexical. They incorporated around 50% of these features from the model texts into their final drafts, with an accuracy rate of 60%. Regarding draft quality, the second draft was significantly better than the first one when rated holistically.

Models as written corrective feedback: Effects on young L2 learners’ fluency in digital writing from product and process perspectives

“…The trend of our feedback group's results does not fully coincide with two pen-and-paper studies which used models as WCF. Contrary to our own feedback group and to her collaborative group, there was a decrease in the three quantity fluency measures used by Lázaro-Ibarrola (2021) in young learners' timed individual writing (word count among them), with an absence of any statistically significant results. The rewritten texts of the two proficiency levels in Cánovas non-model-instruction group had similar word counts in untimed collaborative writing after processing models, as opposed to the increase in the modelinstruction group, whose texts were always longer than those of the other group.…”

“…Past research with models has examined adults (Hanaoka, 2007), adolescents (García-Mayo & Labandibar, 2017;Kang, 2020;Martínez-Esteban &Roca de Larios, 2010), andchildren (Cánovas Guirao, 2018;Cánovas Guirao et al, 2015;Coyle et al, 2018;Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2021;Luquin & García-Mayo, 2021;Roothooft et al, 2022). Models have been implemented in a three-stage writing sequence: 1) a writing stage where participants are also pushed to notice the linguistic features they cannot express or have difficulties with (problematic features noticed); 2) a comparison stage of their own texts with a model text; and 3) a rewriting stage where participants try to include the features noticed in the previous stage into their own texts.…”

“…First, as previously seen, recent WCF works using this technique have often focused on children, the same age group as that of our participants. Second, as shown in the aforementioned results of past research, models have emerged as a promising, student-centered and discoursebased alternative to traditional, teacher-guided options focused on isolated errors such as direct and indirect WCF (Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2021). Third, from a pedagogical angle, offering a single model text to a whole class is considerably more manageable to handle by a teacher than the time-consuming process of offering individual direct or indirect WCF to each student (Coyle & Roca de Larios, 2020).…”

“…The sample sizes were generally small, ranging from five individual writers and six pairs in Martínez-Esteban and Roca de Larios (2010) to Ekanayaka and Ellis' ( 2020) thirty participants in one WCF group and thirty-one writers in both the control and the second WCF groups. Six studies reported inferential statistics (Chandler, 2003;Ekanayaka & Ellis, 2020;Kim et al, 2022;Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2021;Roothooft et al, 2022;Sánchez, 2019), whose results may not be stable due to the small samples that were used. 3.…”

“…Fluency was considered within a multidimensional approach (Van Waes & Leijten, 2015), that is, from both perspectives of the product or final text and of the underlying composing processes. As the WCF technique, we selected models, which have often been used with child participants in recent years (Coyle et al, 2018;Lázaro-Ibarrola, 2021). Empirically, the evidence obtained about young learners' fluency in digital writing would aid to develop our understanding of feedback processing by focusing on a population hitherto unexplored.…”