Abstract
Much attention has been paid to the complexity underlying writing, but the versatile roles that collaborative writing can encourage in elementary students remain scarcely understood. In this exploratory study, we developed a framework for observing the participatory roles that elementary students spontaneously adopt as they engage in collaborative writing in environmental and social studies classrooms. To concretize the applicability of the framework, we illustrate how five students shift between the roles across task types. We identified 18 participatory roles and allocated them into six categories: content-, literacy-, performance-, process-focused, expressive, and off-task roles. While these generally align with previous research on participatory roles, literacy-focused and expressive role categories emerged as new data-driven findings. The concrete examples provided for illustrating how these roles are reflected when students engage in collaborative writing deepen the understanding of the variety and flexibility in roles adopted across the students and task types. We expect the framework to be beneficial for both teachers and researchers, to observe how flexibly students adopt roles from different categories when writing collaboratively. This can provide insights into designing instruction and selecting task types to effectively promote flexible and meaningful participation among all students when writing collaboratively in subject-area classrooms.
- Journal
- Journal of Writing Research
- Published
- 2023-06-01
- DOI
- 10.17239/jowr-2023.15.01.04
- CompPile
- Open Access
- OA PDF Diamond
- Topics
-
- Export
- BibTeX RIS
Citation context
Cited by in this index (0)
No articles in this index cite this work.
References (0)
No references on file for this article.
Related articles
-
Assessing Writing Oct 2026Student-AI collaboration in peer feedback: Effects on perceived feedback quality, emotional responses, and feedback literacy development ↗Hua Wang; Kai Guo
-
Written Communication Apr 2021Sara Wilder
-
Computers and Composition Sep 2026Navigating ethical collaboration with machine translation: An exploratory study on the role of L2 development in GenAI writing ↗Bronwen Dyson; Benjamin Miller; Susan Thomas
-
Journal of Response to Writing Apr 2026Navigating feedback in collaborative writing: The impact of student backgrounds and expectations on transitions to new academic and social spaces ↗Gruber, Lindsey; Fernández–Agüero, María
-
IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication Mar 2026Bridging the Gap: A Comparative Study of Students’ and LSPs’ Perceptions of Translation Internships ↗Shuang Liu