Nature of Peer-Peer Interactions throughout the Writing Process: A Study of Thai Learners of JFL

Abstract

This study sets out to investigate the nature of peer-peer interactions during the entire writing process in a Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) setting and makes a proposal for Japanese writing education at higher educational institutions outside Japan. Twelve university learners of Japanese in Thailand were instructed to write a script for an oral presentation in pairs as part of their classroom activities. They interacted with each other only in Japanese throughout the writing process, consisting of the planning, writing and revision phases, and all pair interactions were either audio- or video-recorded. The analysis of the interactions indicated that collaboration particularly afforded the learners opportunities to generate ideas and solve linguistic problems that they encountered throughout the writing process. Furthermore, the analysis of language-related episodes from the interactions showed that the learners most frequently focused their attention on grammatical problems with discussions about problems related to the reading of Kanji and transliteration of foreign words into Katakana as well as lexical problems. The analysis also revealed that the learners correctly solved most of the linguistic problems while adopting a collaborative approach throughout the writing process. The findings suggested the active implementation of collaborative writing between peers in the target language in a JFL setting henceforth.