Author's Note: This paper, the first draft of which I wrote some ten years ago, represents my examination of current trends in research relative to collaborative writing. It was originally written (aargh!) in APA format, and that is what I adapted to the niceties of this HTML document. Please excuse the marking errors, and note that this is a work in progress.

INTRODUCTION

Most young people find themselves, hopefully as adolescents, in relationships which do not work because they insist upon analyzing them while they are in progress. In an age which assigns importance to human activities according to esoteric personal ideas of relevance, they find it impossible to assess as relevant a relationship on which they've performed an autopsy before its demise.

Likewise in composition, a discipline which has been only marginally separate from literature for less than a half century, researchers find it difficult to categorize, research, theorize about and discuss ideas which are still being formed by the interaction of people developing them. Caught up in this interaction is collaboration, certainly a viable subject of research by composition theorists and just as certainly subject to questions about its relevance because so many theories about collaboration are still being formed.

Like the adolescent who cannot determine the relevance of his relationship because it is still being developed, composition theorists (whether "pure" researchers or practitioners working in the field) have often turned away from teaching collaborative writing because it is not firmly grounded in empirical research. Also like the adolescent (in an analogy which is hopefully not becoming too strained), practitioners turn to one another to commiserate about collaborative experiences which have been unsuccessful and about theories they hope will provide the everlasting solution to their problems.

It is difficult to even describe collaboration as a step-by-step procedure because collaborative writing involves students working in a variety of communal environments. Basically speaking, theories of collaboration involve: 1) a writer or writers, who 2) receive feedback in any form during any stage in the process of writing 3) a draft or drafts. Seen from this perspective, collaborative writing could be said to have been around for a long time‹when, exactly, did the first person begin using a method of giving feedback to a second person during the writing of a draft?

PURPOSE

While collaborative theories appear to have gained neither the reputation nor the popularity required for teaching them as primary subjects to undergraduates in college composition classes, collaborative work by practitioners in the field does take place and is written about in publications ranging from The Journal of Advanced Composition to Writer's Digest. In an article titled "Collaborative Learning and Teaching Writing," John Trimbur (1985) discusses the basic practitioner-based rationale for teaching collaborative writing:

Collaborative learning practices were developed initially from experimental insights. Following an intuition that collaboration could help students learn to write, teachers proceeded by trial and error to organize students in groups so that students could pool their knowledge and experience by working together. . . .The influence of this work has also produced a heightened awareness among composition teachers of the importance of social interaction to learning how to write. Through accumulated experience and a widening theoretical discussion, experiments in collaborative learning now constitute, as it were, a method for composition teachers and a problem for theorists: how to organize and interpret the activity of learning to write through the group interaction of the learners.

This paper will examine some of the theories and methods of collaboration, about which practitioners in the field of composition are writing. In a sense it is impossible to separate practitioners from other researchers in this area, as research into collaboration requires teaching collaborative theory in some form to some one or ones, and if those subjects exhibit any response, then they have been taught and the researcher is a practitioner.

AN OVERVIEW OF RESEARCH IN COLLABORATIVE WRITING

Relative to teaching collaborative writing to adults (i.e., post-secondary students), what are the practitioners' goals? For the process-oriented, the major benefit of collaborative writing appears to be self-awareness and self-confidence; the writer is affirmed in his or her ability to produce, before the product is completed (Duin, 1991). As composition theorest Joseph J. Comprone puts it:

While students' progress may indeed be explained in terms of meeting increasingly complex cognitive demands, they are also negotiating to gradually establish a position of authority over their texts. They are learning that the rhetorical context of written discourse is power-based. And they are practicing at claiming their power. (1989)

For the product-oriented, the benefits of collaboration include: 1) a heuristic for discovery both of ideas and of organizing principles; 2) focuses on writing as problem solving; 3) gives writers a sense of audience early in the process; 4) allows writers to see that finding a voice depends on understanding the social milieu in which they write; 5) allows for editing intervention early in the process; and 6) parallels the way writing is done in the professional world (Woolever, 1991).

According to figures presented at a 1988 meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, 81 percent of college teachers and 89 percent of secondary teachers use collaboration for prewriting and revision (Lemon, 1988). It is interesting to note that, according to this research secondary teachers use collaboration at more stages of the writing process than university instructors, and exert more control over how their students use collaboration methods in small group work (Lemon, 1988).

Research in collaborative writing abounds. Articles range from those written by primary school teachers working with basic writers, to researchers into advanced composition theories using graduate students as subjects. Yet the basic goals as listed above seem to apply to most, if not all of the cases, and the basic question seems to involve whether or not teaching collaborative writing is more effective than teaching product-oriented traditional grammar-based theories. According to practitioner researcher Sally Crisp, "The culmination of these things is autonomy or freedom" (Crisp, 1992).

Current research in collaborative theory appears to rely heavily on what Mikhail Bakhtin calls dialogism, a relationship of one utterance to another in a research environment which involves context and the interaction between reader and writer (Ewald, 1990). Researcher Helen Ewald relates Bakhtin's theory of dialogism to collaboration in that

by locating expression in society rather than in self, an enhanced appreciation of authorship as a community-based activity may result; and by accepting flux as the natural order of things, and of the rhetorical situation, a true appreciation for the relentless change which underpins the composing process may be achieved, and thus those pedagogical strategies which emphasize openness, rather than closure, and which posit change as the norm can be embraced. (Ewald, 1990)

Practitioner researchers Charles W. Dawe and Edward A. Dornan (1981) list, at the beginning of their premier work on teaching collaboration, their goals:

1. We want students to learn a composing process that they can use, though perhaps in modified form, whenever they write.
2. We want to establish a writer/reader relationship and a conference format that will help us facilitate learning.
3. We want to teach, indirectly, the importance of certain maxims of good writing‹create a design, use the active voice, work from a plan, consider your reader, use transitional devices, write concretely and specifically, keep the tense straight, and use climactic order.
4. We want to teach the importance of working in drafts by having students do it, not by lecturing about it.
5. We want to do all this little by little, like the teacher in the "Watermelon Eaters."

According to Comprone, "Most of this theoretical work [into collaboration in composition classrooms] argues that such oral interaction in writing courses has positive effects on the composing process of students, and therefore also a positive effect on those students' written texts" (1989). He cautions practitioners, however, against too closely embracing the metaphor of "ongoing conversation" in composition classroom could blur the complex distinctions writers must make between oral and written texts (1989).

The following is a brief synopsis of a few of the published works relative to individual implementations of collaborative writing theory. The source for this list is an ERIC search request for items on collaborative writing. There were more than 290 listings, and the following are representative samples of some of the field research underway:

• "Lifewriting" is the name of a class taught in a Vancouver, British Columbia, secondary writing class. Stress is on community development of biographical sketches (Butler, 1988).
• In a three-year collaborative effort between the School District of the City of Saginaw, Michigan, and the University of Michigan, students in six sections of tenth grade American literature were subjects of field tests designed to provide empirical data concerning the difference between single-teacher non-collaborative and collaborative team teaching writing outcomes (Collaborative Writing, 1989).
• Ethnographic research into the success of private teacher-student collaboration among ninth grade students, by California researcher Melanie Sperling (1989).
• A case study of college students designated as "problematic." Students were evaluated relative to leadership criteria and their interaction examined to determine how it met (or did not meet) the group's expectations at the end of collaborative projects (Tebo-Messina, 1989).
• A teacher of an undergraduate literature course, inspired by the increasing use of collaborative writing in the work place and by reader-response criticism, required a collaborative writing assignment in the course, using a computer laboratory. Responses to "debriefing questionnaires" 1) indicated satisfaction on the part of students, 2) described the differences between students and student groups in method and task-assignment, and 3) indicated the students felt the interaction increased their understanding of the literature assigned (Smith, 1989).
• At Borough of Manhattan Community College in New York City, approximately 12 instructors teach composition in a specially designed computer laboratory. In the lab the students collaborate on all writing assignments, as part of an ongoing research effort (Moberg, 1988).
• A teacher training video titled "Student Writing Groups: Demonstrating the Process," involved teaching collaborative writing. This film won a 1989 "Media and Methods" award (Student Writing Groups, 1988).
• In the non-academic arena, a study was conducted of a group writing project in the Aldouest Insurance Company Department of Corporate Communication (pseudonym); although the work was completed long after the deadline, employees involved reported better understanding of the process of report writing (Cross, 1989).
• Research involving observation of two freshman composition classes at the University of Missouri (Kansas City) yielded recommendation of a four-step sequence of collaborative writing instruction involving 1) class-wide, teacher-led discussion of a reading or of the subject of the writing assignment; 2) small group discussion of the project; 3) collaborative writing in small groups; and 4) individual completion of the writing assignment (Rothstein-Vandergriff & Gilson, 1988).

This is a something of what practitioners are doing in the field to develop and implement collaborative teaching and writing theory. From these examples and others, what data can we draw relative to the outcomes of practitioner research? In Capitalizing on Collaboration: Using Groups to Help Students Write Better Drafts (1986), Joanne Kurfiss presents an analysis of writing projects to determine if students could benefit from collaboration before they are ready for draft feedback. The "cognitive and social support" students receive through collaboration, Kurfiss states, provides social support which helps students address the challenges of academic writing. She said her research found student improvement in four areas: 1) generating and evaluating ideas; 2) summarizing and synthesizing reading materials; 3) developing ideas; and 4) critical thinking and reading.

Kurfiss' four areas of student improvement through collaboration illustrate what appear to be the basic thrust, or reason for, research into collaboration‹determination of how the student will benefit from collaborative writing, and comparison of those benefits to those gained through grammar-based and rule-based traditional teaching theories. A pamphlet from Phi Delta Kappa Educational Foundation divides these into stimulus, process and product. According to pamphlet author Donovan R. Walling (1987), implications of collaboration in teaching writing are: 1) teachers should not make assumptions about the process characteristics of their students; 2) students need to understand their own, personal process characteristics; 3) teachers can model or suggest process options; and 4) teachers can provide and expand opportunities for students to examine other students' processes through collaborative writing assignments.

CONCLUSION

After examining some of what practitioners have done (and are doing) in the field, what can be said of the theories on which they base their work? Are there elements which can be drawn from their work, parts of an overall theory out of which many other theories operate? Aside from collaboration as a somewhat nebulous act, practitioner research reveals that there are some more concrete statements which can be made.

In much of the research I examined, the computer played a major role in facilitating student collaboration. Some instructors used computers in the classroom (Murdick, 1989). Others taught writing on the computer, with collaboration taking place among peers or with trained facilitators as "hard copies" of drafts are printed (Crisp, 1992). In none of the research I read were computers seen in other than a favorable light, though in some they weren't mentioned at all.

But most practitioner researchers in adult education appeared to see computer-assisted writing instruction in the same light as William Wresch (1984):

Every instructor ha spent innumerable class hours discussing everything from comma splices to elements of style only to have the lecture fall on deaf ears because students needed the information not while sitting in the class, but later sitting at a desk (or a terminal) doing some writing. The thrust of Wresch's work indicated that students are more likely to understand and apply information in their instructors' lectures if the students' work is in progress during the lecture itself. Preferably, Wresch states, the draft or notes should be present via the fluid medium of the computer terminal (1984).

In recent research, ownership seems to be an important factor in collaborative work. This not only means ownership of the piece of writing, but ownership as well of the criticism students or other collaboration facilitators give the writer about his work. Comprone (1989) addresses this issue when he speaks of students "claiming their power" through collaboration.

The researchers I read indicated that collaborative writing benefits instructors as well as students, though students are the main beneficiaries because these programs "acknowledge that communication must be redefined through experience and consistent experimentation" (Laque & Sherwood, 1977). Collaborative research is ongoing and in recent years more and more instructors‹practitioner researchers‹have added to what many composition theorists already believe about this type of writing, that it is beneficial to students and instructors, and through them not only to the university but to all society.

Butler, S., and R. Bentley (1988). "Writing as a collaborative activity: lessons from the lifewriting class." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the British Columbia Teachers of English. Vancouver, BC: Oct. 21, 1988. ERIC document No. ED316863.

"Collaborative Writing Project Product Evaluation 1988-1989." Evaluation Report. Saginaw, MI: Michigan Department of Evaluation Services, 1989.

"Collaborative Writing." Searches and records from ERIC 1982 - September 1992. (291 entries). University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Ottenheimer Library, on November 12, 1992. Comprone, J. (1989 Spring).

"Textual perspectives on collaborative learning: dialogic literacy and written texts in composition Classrooms." Writing Instructor, 8(3). pg. 119-28. Cornell, C, and Robert Newton. (1988).

"Collaborative Revision on a Computer." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. St. Louis, MO: March 17-19, 1988. ERIC document No. ED295155.

Crisp, S. (1992 March). "Assertive collaboration in the writing center: discovering autonomy through community." The Writing Lab Newsletter, pg. 11-16. Cross, G. (1989).

"Conflict and Capitulation: A Bakhtinian Analysis of a Failed collaboration." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Seattle, WA: March 16-18, 1989. ERIC document No. ED307623.

Dawe, C., and Edward A. Dornan. (1981). One to One: Resources for Conference Centered Writing. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.

Duin, A. (1991 April). "Computer-supported collaborative writing: the workplace and the writing classroom." Journal of Business and Technical Communication, 5(2). pg. 123-50.

Ewald, H. (1990). "Mikhail Bakhtin and 'Expressive Discourse'." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Chicago, IL: March 22-24, 1990. ERIC document No. ED318031.

Kurfiss, J. (1986). "Capitalizing on Collaboration: Using Groups to Help Students Write Better Drafts." EDRS Price, 1986. ERIC document No. ED295164.

Laque, C., & P. Sherwood. (1977). A Laboratory Approach to Writing. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English

Lemon, H. (1988). "Collaborative Strategies for Teaching Composition: Theory and Practice." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. St. Louis, MO: March 17-19, 1988.

Moberg, G. (1988). Merging Computer Writing and Collaborative Learning: The Role of Space in Room N779. New York: Manhattan Community College Press. ERIC document ED302849.

Murdick, W., & R. Grinstead. (1989). "Using Collaborative Writing Pedagogy in the Art Classroom." Paper presented at the West Virginia Art Education Association Fall Conference. Shepherdstown, WV: October 607, 1989.

Rothstein-Vandergriff, J, and J. Gilson. (1988). "Collaboration with Basic Writers in the Composition Classroom." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. St. Louis, MO: March 17-19, 1988.

Smith, E. (1989). "Shaping Literacy Response through Collaborative Writing." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Seattle, WA: March 16-18, 1989. ERIC document ED303820.

Sperling, M. (1989). I Want To Talk to Each of You: Collaboration and the Teacher-Student Writing Conference. Berkeley: Center for the Study of Writing. ERIC document ED312668.

Student Writing Groups: Demonstrating the Process. (1988). Tacoma, WA: Wordshop Productions, 1988. A 35-minute film with 26-page workbook. ERIC document No. ED312662.

Tebo-Messina, M. (1989 Winter). "Authority and Models of the Writing Workshop: All Collaborative Learning is Not Equal." Writing Instructor, 8(2). pg. 86-92.

Trimbur, J. (1985). "Collaborative learning and teaching writing." In Ben W. McClelland and Timothy R. Donovan (eds), Perspectives on Research and Scholarship in Composition. New York: The Modern Language Association of America.

Woolever, K. (1991). "Reassessing the Role of Collaborative Writing in Advanced Composition." Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, Boston, MA: March 21-23, 1991. ERIC document No. ED333455.

Wresch, W. (1984). The Computer in Composition Instruction: A Writer's Tool. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English.