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Weekly UpdatesWhile students obviously overlooked slightly more errors than they chose to accurately correct, they demonstrated a willingness to participate in the collaborative activity. They engaged in both peer- and self-editing throughout the semester.
Peer- and Self-Editing
Students were not hesitant to edit their peers' postings. In fact, they demonstrated more willingness to edit their peers' writing than their own. A total of 130 of the iterations were devoted to contributing to others' previous contributions. Table 5 shows comparisons between peer- and self-editing across individuals.
These totals reflect LREs and other contributions to illustrate the focus students placed upon the latter. When addressing issues of formatting and other non-LRE related contributions, students were primarily self-editing. In fact, students engaged in much more self-editing overall, but the form-focused edits were primarily peer-focused. Peer-editing contributions included 72 of the 77 form-oriented LREs. All of the 35 form-focused contributions were peer revisions. This supports the notion that students were willing and able to work collaboratively in the autonomous environment. Thirty iterations were devoted to selfcorrecting. 25 of these involved corrections of content or style while five involved issues of accuracy. Although this number may be small, the overall peer- and self-editing activity seems to be spread broadly across the students. All of the 40 students demonstrated at least one incident of self-correction of some sort. 26 of the occurrences of self-correction happened within ten minutes of a previous contribution. Self-correcting in such an environment may be support for the notion that public display of texts instills a sense of responsibility and obligation.
DISCUSSION
The first research question addresses students' autonomous performance in a long-term collaborative writing task. The results suggest that students were able to meet the knowledge and skills subcomponents of ability within Littlewood's (1996) autonomy framework, but lacked the motivation and/or confidence subcomponents of willingness. Considering the high frequency of peer-edits, the students appear confident in their collaboration. The nature of peer-edits also suggests that students were not afraid to critique one another. It appears that they lacked the willingness to attend to form issues that they were quite capable of correcting. It appears that there is a contextualized willingness and an associated continuum of tolerance regarding form; students simply did not address issues of form that did not impede meaning. In the interviews, students expressed surprise that there would be any focus on grammar following this activity despite the fact that the prompt explicitly encouraged them to strive for accuracy both in content and language. Two astute observers mentioned that since they hadn't been corrected explicitly they didn't bother to focus on the form of their contributions. In fact, these same two individuals found this activity to be "extremely liberating" and "a lot of fun" due to the lack of explicit attention to grammar. These students both explained that they teach grammar explicitly because that is how they were taught, but they would reconsider this approach in their future teaching. This response runs counter to Stryker's (1997) suggestion that the lack of grammar in a Content-Based Instruction context may result in students demanding explicit grammar instruction. Perhaps a limited amount of teacher intervention, or some external incentive, would encourage more attention to issues of accuracy.
The second research question concerns level of accuracy in peer- and self-editing. Participants in this study were willing to contribute to the collaborative task in the form of peer- and self-editing. Self-editing was primarily focused on revisions unrelated to form while peer-editing addressed form more frequently. The students demonstrated an ability to perform autonomously but did not demonstrate an equivalent willingness to strive for perfect grammatical accuracy. When presented with grammatical errors they had made in the autonomous task, they were able to quickly resolve them in the follow-up interviews. These findings are consistent with those of Williams (1999) in regard to the nature of students' initiation of attention to form: students will focus on form when engaged in meaning-based tasks, albeit infrequently. It also supports Storch's (2001) findings that writing tasks result in less student-initiated attention to form. However, this experiment with many-to-many collaborative writing did not appear to contribute to an increased grammatical accuracy as previous studies have found in pair or small group peer collaborative tasks (Storch, 2005).
Question 3 regards the overall nature of student long-term collaborative writing. Other observations indicate that students were more likely to be accurate when focusing on grammar rather than correcting grammar as a secondary act while focusing on meaning. Since the primary focus of their contributions leaned toward content, the accuracy of their self-initiated attention to form may have suffered. In fact, students frequently overlooked glaring grammatical issues that they later demonstrated ability to correct, while attending to rather insignificant issues of formatting, font, and other personal stylistic preferences. In spite of this lack of accuracy, interviews revealed that students seemed to be satisfied with the level of accuracy for the context of this task. Based upon information gathered in follow up interviews, this lack of attention to form is the result of two factors: the informal context of the collaborative writing environment and the perceived low-impact nature of the errors themselves. While this may be enhanced by an increased priority upon the role of form, it may simply indicate that this level of grammatical accuracy was acceptable for the context of this task. Students were not distracted by the errors due to the lack of severity, and they were much more focused on addressing issues of meaning and design. An acceptable level of tolerance for errors may play an important role in the development of autonomy through autonomous tasks.
Pedagogical Implications
Autonomous environments may encourage participation and enhance collaborative creation of information, but it may be necessary that the teacher experiment with a variety of roles (including no role at all) in order to allow competent advanced students to explore topics extensively. Such extensive selfguided exploration encourages the autonomy that learners need to acquire language (Little, 2007). While many tasks in a content-based class may involve elements of, or even a focus on, form, it may be equally important to provide students with tasks that do not introduce the power dynamics of the teachers' presence. In fact, there may be an unseen benefit for the advanced-level students in the form of greater output (Oxford, 1997), more opportunity for practice (Ortega, 2007), or a greater sense of autonomy (Benson, 1997). Each of these characteristics may contribute to linguistic development, particularly for more advanced language learners. The task and environment may influence these fluency building practices as well as their attention to accuracy.
Students may benefit from a carefully created and controlled environment that encourages autonomous collaboration without the teacher playing a strong presence or any presence at all once the collaboration is underway. It may be fruitful to provide a variety of collaborative tasks in order to find optimal conditions for particular groups of language learners and their unique needs. With a limited body of research on the use of wikis in the language classroom, language teachers should embrace the opportunity to experiment and observe students' use in varied collaborative tasks with varied teacher content and form-focused intervention.
Limitations and Recommendations for Future Research
With the increased use of collaborative tools such as wikis it is inevitable that more research will provide insight into the ways these tools can best serve the needs of teachers and students. This study explores the potential of student-centered autonomous collaborative writing tasks used by NNS EFL teacher candidates in Mexico. While the results of this study may be valuable for a variety of contexts, there are certainly student populations who do not have much in common with the participants in this study. Replicating this study with other groups of language students from a variety of language backgrounds and contexts would enhance the conclusions of this study. Future research may also examine the students' interaction with the text in varied ways.
Unlike previous studies, which have taken place in face-to-face classrooms and focused on tasks or number of turns necessary to resolve issues of form (Storch, 2001; Williams, 1999), this task took place in an autonomous web based teacherless environment. The attention to form was comparable to these previous studies. While it may be disappointing that students did not demonstrate the willingness to correct form in an autonomous task, there may be much to learn from this observation. It seems that students in this study achieved an acceptable threshold of accuracy for the context in which they were working. In fact, it seems that they may establish different thresholds for different settings and tasks. Perhaps the very nature of the teacherless space encourages a more relaxed attitude toward accuracy.
Follow up interviews indicated that students considered the discussion forums and wiki to be very different environments due to the intervention of the teacher in the discussion forums. This may provide interesting opportunities for future research. Future researchers may also consider holding students accountable for the whole of a text, rather than the small portions they choose to edit, since each alteration essentially creates an entirely new iteration of the text as a whole. The limited amount of form correction overall, and self-correction in particular, suggests that even students at this advanced level of proficiency may need more teacher intervention or grading incentive when working in autonomous environments. Constructing alternate wiki-based tasks with varying degrees of teacher intervention while maintaining a modicum of autonomy for students may also contribute to a better understanding of the optimal role of a teacher in creating and maintaining autonomous learning environments.
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