Enhancing collaboration: Exploring regulated learning strategies in the co-regulatory processes of collaborative L2 writing

Abstract

Collaborative writing (CW) is a pedagogical practice that requires active engagement from all participants to create more L2 learning opportunities, which help to develop metacognitive awareness and writing autonomy. In self-regulated learning research, learners apply various regulated learning (RL) strategies to monitor their individual process within a task. These same RL strategies can be applied to the co-regulatory processes of CW, but to regulate themselves, their partners and/or social group at different co-construction stages (Hadwin & Miller, 2017). While current CW research highlights L2 development benefits, less is known about how pairs with collaborative orientations use RL strategies during co-regulatory processes. To fill this gap, this study aims to identify the RL strategies that students with collaborative orientations use to maintain their collaborative patterns of interaction. Through a Sociocultural Theory perspective, the transcribed audio recordings of six international postgraduate students during two CW activities were examined using languaging episodes as the basic unit of analysis before coding each episode for RL strategies and three regulatory agents. The findings revealed how pairs used varied RL strategies when addressing local and/or global issues to maintain collaborative patterns. They were able to appropriate some knowledge from the first CW activity to the second by applying various RL strategies to improve on time management and writing efficiency. Understanding the dynamic co-regulatory process sheds additional light on how RL strategies can be appropriated as conceptual knowledge to co-writing collaboratively.