The Effects of Collaborative Summary Writing on University Students’ L2 Writing Development

The purpose of the study is to investigate the effects of collaborative summary writing on Korean university students’ second language (L2) writing development. Twenty-seven students were divided into control group (CG) and experimental group (EG), both of which were taught by the researcher with the same syllabus and textbook. Students in both classes were asked to do a short summary of a news article at the beginning of the class. CG students summarized individually and EG students underwent collaborative summary writing in pairs. The summaries were analyzed for L2 development using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer on nine syntactic structures and fourteen syntactic complexity indices. Significant gains were noted for both CG and EG after the summary writing treatment in terms of length, amount of coordination, degree of phrasal sophistication, and overall sentence complexity. Subsequent statistical analysis on the significant differences in gains made by the two groups showed EG used more coordinate phrases, coordinate phrases per T-unit, and verb phrases per T-unit, but less T-units per sentence, all of which indicate higher L2 development. Finally, pedagogical implications are discussed in the final section of the paper.