Collaboration Between Children Learning to Write: Can Novices Be Masters?

Abstract This study describes social aspects of the literacy learning process among young peers and synthesizes distinct strands of research on socially constructed literacy. Fourteen 7- to 9-year-old children in a third-grade urban classroom wrote four stories individually and three stories collaboratively with a partner over a 3-month period. Analyses of the children's individual and collaborative stories and transcripts of their collaboration processes as they composed together were done to identify children's expertises as writers and to trace any transfer of knowledge about the structure of stories between partners. Analyses of the 7,512 talk turns in the collaborative composing sessions showed that 95 % of the story elements added after collaboration had been the focus of children's talk as they composed together. Furthermore, children who demonstrated even minimal ability to write stories transferred basic aspects of story structure to each other. To learn more about the social nature of literacy development, we related these children's collaboration processes to those identified as important in teacher-student collaborations (Collins, Brown, & Newman, 1989). Like expert-novice pairs, young peers used generative processes and reflective processes, yet they also did considerable repeating, which seemed to serve them well. This study shows that the literacy learning process involves intense engagement among young peers who share their relative expertises as they focus intellectual and social energies on the text they create together.