V.S.P.O.W.: An Innovative Collaborative Writing Approach to Improve Chinese as L2 Pupils' Linguistic Skills

• Lung-Hsiang Wong , National Institute of Education, Singapore
• Chee-Kuen Chin , Singapore Centre for Chinese Language
• Wenli Chen , National Institute of Education, Singapore
• Ping Gao , National Institute of Education, Singapore

This paper outlines an eclectic approach to assist juvenile Chinese as second language (L2) pupils in Singapore in developing linguistic-related micro-skills for writing. The recursive, bottom-up writing process requires the pupils to collaboratively carry out “word/phrase pooling”, “sentence making”, “paragraph writing” and “outlining” on wiki, and eventually composing their essays individually. The intention is to fill up the gap between the current-traditional product-oriented approach and the more cognitively demanding process-oriented approach, that is, juvenile L2 learners' limited linguistic and cognitive skills that would hinder them from writing proper essays, not to mention carrying out process writing. The results of our pilot study show that the target pupils' micro-skills for writing were improved significantly due to emergent peer coaching. There is also an implication that through such peer coaching activities, the perceived challenge of pupils' individual differences in linguistic proficiency could be turned into an advantage for motivating pupils' collaboration in learning.
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