Scaffolding Feedback Between Cowriters With Different Levels of English-Language Proficiency

Research Background for the Study

The terms native English speaker (NES) and non–native English speaker (NNES) have been much debated in the literature, particularly the extent to which they are put in opposition to each other in a static dichotomy (Lillis & Curry, 2010; Pérez-Llantada, Plo, & Ferguson, 2011). Researchers have argued against these categorizations, calling for more nuanced understandings of language proficiency that acknowledge the fluidity of language practice (Koerber & Graham, 2017). In the following study, I attend to these important considerations by discussing language ability in terms of perceptions of proficiency. Specifically, I stray away from objective language criteria—such as tests of proficiency—and instead embrace the ways that cowriters’ perceptions of each other’s linguistic abilities, or proficiency, influence their collaboration and feedback. Writers’ perceptions of their fellow cowriters’ proficiency can be influenced by factors such as their name, accent, education level and location, job title and status within an organization, years of experience with a language as well as the presence (or lack) of grammatical mistakes within a text.

At the same time, the labels NES and NNES do influence how participants view themselves and their peers; those identifiers factor into the larger equation of how they perceive proficiency. In some cases, the labels can suggest the contexts in which the English language was learned. In other cases, they can represent affiliations with a particular language group. Writers might also use these labels to suggest their own familiarity with a language without drawing attention to specific linguistic markers of proficiency. The complexity of these labels can be seen in the varied ways in which the participants in this study use them. Some participants used NES and NNES to suggest higher proficiency (HP) and lower proficiency (LP), respectively. But in some instances, NNES writers described helping both NES and NNES writers improve their writing, demonstrating that NES writers did not always have HP and that NNES writers did not always have LP. NNES participants also perceived their own proficiency as evolving and in some cases referred to themselves as nonnative speakers of English with native speaking proficiency. All of these situations illustrate the multifaceted nature of proficiency and its relativity in interactions.

The importance of taking a perception-focused approach to proficiency is that writers’ confidence in their own and their peers’ abilities is often influenced by assumptions based on their perceptions of EP. Specifically, people’s perceptions of another person’s linguistic ability often influence their assumptions about that person’s intellectual competency (Trahar, 2007), and when students collaborate on teams, those who exhibit a LP in English might be misperceived as potential threats to the success of students who have a HP (Le Roux, 2001). These misperceptions might cause writers who perceive themselves as having a LP to have less confidence in their own abilities or to view feedback from HP peers as more authoritative, constraining the dialogue and engagement between collaborators (Allen & Katayama, 2016; Allen & Mills, 2016; MacIntyre, Noels, & Clément, 2002). Alternatively, writers who perceive themselves as having a HP might have less confidence in their LP peers’ abilities to perform writing tasks according to what they believe is the appropriate “standard” (Harrison & Peacock, 2010).

In a study on an international classroom in the United Kingdom, Harrison and Peacock (2010) explored how perceptions of EP negatively affected the collaboration between NES and NNES student writers. The researchers found that NES writers perceived their NNES peers as having a LP and therefore did not have confidence in the NNES writers’ abilities to perform a writing task. The NES students explained that texts written by their NNES peers were “not to their [NESs’] sort of standard” and expressed concern over how that would affect the groups’ grades (p. 889). Instead of using the situation as an opportunity to discuss linguistic differences and expectations for the text, the NES students avoided giving feedback to their NNES peers and rewrote the text that was “so bad”:

Although the students did not indicate what their precise textual concerns were, this example shows that the NES students made assumptions about Sven’s ability to accomplish the writing task based on their perceptions of his linguistic competency. When we look at the NES students’ reflections on the situation, we can see that they struggled with the decision to rewrite their peer’s text. The NES students reflected on the problematic nature of their actions and used face-saving disclaimers, such as “This is gonna make us sound really bad,” and justifications, such as “we were getting really stressed.” But their anxiety over how Sven’s text could have threatened their grades and success trumped their desire to maintain collaboration throughout the project.

The feedback avoidance exhibited by the NES students in Harrison and Peacock’s (2010) study reveals a troubling and unproductive approach that is echoed in other research as well. Specifically, when NES students avoid giving feedback and communicating with NNES peers, the latter can often respond in a reciprocally unproductive manner by withdrawing from group discussions and decision making (Aritz & Walker, 2009; Gluszek & Dovidio, 2010; Poznahovska, 2016). For example, in a pilot study conducted with 37 students at my institution, a NNES student described a situation in which her NES peers decided to exclude her from editing the group project. She found the decision “a little off-putting…because [she] had worked on a lot of other projects like this before” and believed herself to be “pretty good at those kinds of tasks” (Poznahovska, 2016, p. 15). Despite not agreeing with this decision, the student acquiesced to their choice without bringing her concerns to her peers’ attention. She explained that on one hand, she did not want to “make it a big deal,” but on the other hand, she also “didn’t know what to do about that” (p. 18). When students do not know how to address issues around language expectations, they risk creating unproductive team dynamics that can suppress conversation and deliberation and potentially lead to their resenting both the project and the collaborative process as a whole.

These studies suggest students’ overall dissatisfaction and anxiety about working with peers who are linguistically different and their unawareness of how to address these situations in a collaborative way. Such anxieties over feedback are not unique to students who cowrite. Factors such as deadlines (Ding & Ding, 2008; Yu, 2012) and cross-cultural differences (Bokor, 2011; Kupka et al., 2009) can decrease students’ confidence and put unproductive pressure on them to balance collaboration with the demands of an assignment. Research on teamwork has already made great strides in addressing obstacles related to feedback during collaborations, providing students with valuable practices such as forming task schedules and team charters in order to structure feedback and manage divergent expectations (Wolfe, 2010; Yu, 2012) as well as encouraging students to actively deliberate participation and performance standards (Earley & Gibson, 2002; Goby, 2007; Starke-Meyerring, 2005; Wolfe & Alexander, 2005).

While research on group anxiety and team planning has provided students with strategies for scaffolding feedback and deliberation, much of the research has overlooked the role that EP differences play within a cowriting context. Specifically, when EP differences arise on a team, anxieties concerning efficacy, performance, and time management can often be exacerbated, making this context especially interesting to study. In the following example from an interview for this study, one professional (NES) reflected on the anxieties and dilemmas she faced when deciding to offer feedback to a NNES peer during a graduate school team project:

I don’t know that I have the skills to teach a nonnative English speaker how to improve their writing. Nor was I sure that that would’ve been great if I had done that…was that my role as a student? And would he even want me to do that? Or would he be offended and be annoyed that I was trying to do it? (Participant 15, NES)

The participant’s comment suggests her anxiety about providing feedback without having adequate experience and ethos.

Research has previously touched on this resistance to feedback, finding that in situations in which feedback is perceived as unsolicited “teaching,” students are less likely to offer commentary to one another (Wolfe & Alexander, 2005). Students in Wolfe and Alexander’s study noted that teaching collaborators takes too much time and that it is intrusive and not collaborative; therefore, team projects should not be spaces for that kind of instructive work. Such a perception of feedback limits what students can do in the face of EP differences, often leaving them with counterproductive options, such as avoiding communication with peers and usurping texts they perceive to be troublesome. We can see this side effect with Participant 15 (NES), who ultimately rewrote her peer’s text with her other NES teammates, taking an approach similar to that of the students in Harrison and Peacock’s study.

Scholars interested in the role that language plays in writing have been more consistently investigating how writers navigate EP within different academic contexts (Allen & Katayama, 2016; Allen & Mills, 2016; Koerber & Graham, 2017; Storch, 2005). Unfortunately, other than Koerber and Graham’s (2017) research on proficiency in scholarly writing, much of this research has been out of the purview of professional communication. Furthermore, while existing research has been helpful in raising questions about how EP affects managing the writing process, to my knowledge, it has not given students concrete strategies for how to address perceived proficiency differences within their teams. The goal of this study, therefore, is to explore possible strategies that students can use to help them manage the challenges related to cowriting across EPs.

Toward that end, I interviewed professionals who have experienced cowriting across different EPs in order to investigate their collaborative practices. Turning to professional collaborators for advice about how to help college students is useful for two main reasons: First, professional communication scholars have frequently examined and found insightful the rhetorical practices used by professionals (Koerber & Graham, 2017; Lunsford & Ede, 2011), and their rhetorical practices have often provided foundations for pedagogical research and practices that have benefited students within the classroom (Blakeslee, 2001; Quick, 2012). Second, by turning to professionals for advice, we can offer students solace in knowing that professionals too encounter similar challenges when cowriting across EP differences but that they have approaches for managing those obstacles. To better understand professionals’ collaborative practices and begin thinking about pedagogical implementations, this study explores the following research questions:

What strategies do professionals use when they cowrite across EP differences?

Based on the data collected in this study, I suggest three strategies that students can use in the classroom: calibrate genre and reader expectations, establish protocols for reviewing texts, and frame feedback as a learning opportunity. These strategies might look familiar to scholars and teachers of teamwork and professional writing. Although this exploratory study does not reinvent the wheel, it does shed light on the significance of using already established strategies in the context of cowriting across EP differences. And its findings provide insight into pedagogical approaches that writing instructors can use to help students mitigate their anxieties and feel more empowered to engage with diverse peers.

Method

Using my university’s alumni directory, I recruited 20 professionals (12 female, 8 male) via e-mail from technical industries, the arts, nonprofit organizations, and higher education. These participants were chosen based on their experience with cowriting documents across different EPs and then compensated with a US$20 Amazon gift card. All participants in the study reported having experienced cowriting across different EPs within the past year, with 90% of them having had at least 3 years of experience. ¹

Although this study looks at perceptions of proficiency difference, both the participants and I use the terms NES and NNES throughout the interviews. In those instances, the terms do not quantify the level of proficiency but rather serve as background information about the participants and signal the context in which they learned the English language. Readers should be aware that my recruiting e-mail used the term “native English speaker,” which might have prompted participants to think in terms of the NES/NNES dichotomy. But I began the interviews by speaking about proficiency, asking participants to reflect on their experiences with writing with “people of different linguistic proficiencies”; I did not begin using the terms “native English speaker” and “nonnative English speaker” until after the participants mentioned them first in the interviews. Almost all the participants identified themselves as either NES or NNES, with only one participant—Participant 16—perceiving himself to be both. He explained that his native language was not English but that he now has native EP after years of studying and working in the United States. Throughout the remainder of this study, I refer to him as NNES to NES.

My data collection consisted of 20 experience-based interviews. I used a semistructured, open-ended approach for these interviews, which started by asking participants to recall and describe a recent collaborative situation in their lives:

I’d like you to remember a recent example or recent situation where you had to cowrite a document with someone who had a different language proficiency. And once you have one, I’d like you to walk me through the situation in as much detail as possible.

After I established the topic, participants directed the conversation, elaborating on the specifics of their examples.

The 20 interviews generated 16 transcripts and 4 detailed sets of notes that I took during the interview. To analyze the interview data, I used grounded theory (Charmaz & Belgrave, 2012; Glaser & Strauss, 1967), identifying patterns and salient responses through careful, iterative study and comparison of the codes within the transcripts. To facilitate the grounded theory analysis within this study, I used the software MaxQDA (Version 2018.2) to create, assign, and organize codes within the data. To initially sort the data, I used descriptive starter codes (Miles, Huberman, & Saldaña, 2014). Then, I used open coding (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) to identify more specific situations, attitudes, and behaviors within participants’ interview responses, recoding the data based on the open-coding system. Finally, using axial coding (Corbin & Strauss, 1990), I looked for codes that appeared together frequently, identifying trends, patterns, connections, and relationships between the open codes. I then clustered the open codes, labeled the clusters with a broader axial code, and gave these axial codes a specific definition. Once again, I recoded the entire data set with the additional axial codes to both check the viability of the codes and identify any inconsistencies within the coding.

In the following section, I discuss my findings according to the most prominent themes that emerged from the axial coding of the data.

Findings

The participants in this study stressed the importance of planning for cowriting with peers with different EPs. Specifically, these professionals’ plans comprised not only temporal dimensions such as timelines but also analytical dimensions such as genre analysis and the negotiation of feedback norms. Their experiences suggest three specific strategies that cowriters can use to plan for productive collaboration: calibrate genre and reader expectations, establish protocols for reviewing texts, and frame feedback as a learning opportunity. During interviews, the professionals described employing the strategies to different degrees and often in combination with one another.

Discussion

The purpose of this study is primarily pedagogical—to identify team strategies that students can use when cowriting across EP differences. Previous research has called for more exploration into collaborations across proficiency differences, but little work has been done in this area. In conducting this research, I identified three specific strategies that professionals used that can benefit students when they cowrite across EP differences: calibrate genre and reader expectations, establish protocols for reviewing texts, and frame feedback as a learning opportunity. By using the three strategies, professionals created avenues for feedback and discussion, thereby scaffolding productive conflict and collaboration with peers who have different EPs.

The findings suggest that calibrating genre and reader expectations is important throughout a project. By reviewing institutional policies, reader perspectives, and models, writers can set expectations for deliverables and provide each other with frameworks for proceeding on a text. These expectations are often recalibrated as the project proceeds and goals shift; hence, part of the success of calibration is also recalibration. That is, calibration is an iterative process; as writers progress on a project, different expectations might surface (Wolfe, 2010). Peers, therefore, need to check in with each other throughout the process. If they rely on a single calibration at the beginning of a project, they risk divergences that delay progress later on.

Establishing protocols for reviewing texts offers several benefits to cowriters, especially when there is the potential of face-threatening situations during feedback. Having an explicit protocol for review and revision processes means that cowriters know their role within a text but also can expect to receive feedback from other contributors. When review protocols are outlined and agreed upon, feedback becomes an expected part of the cowriting culture and is less face threatening because the team focuses on following protocols rather than critiquing individual writers. Because the writers have established that feedback and revision are part of the writing process, they anticipate being critiqued and are less likely to feel that it is a personal offense to their expertise or abilities. As Wolfe (2010) explained, “scheduling revision and feedback into the task schedule creates a team culture in which constructive feedback is simply part of what gets the project done and is not a negative reflection of anybody’s work” (p. 60).

The professionals in this study stressed that in order to reap the benefits of collaborating across EPs, cowriters needed to encourage a broader culture of ongoing learning within the workplace. Specifically, the interview findings suggest that when professionals and their peers framed feedback as a learning opportunity that is part of the cowriting process, they were more receptive to the feedback and engaged in dialogue about their writing. We see this echoed in research on college writing that suggests that students who cling to the writing habits and attitudes about their writing abilities that they had in high school tended to experience a more difficult time adapting to the new academic environment. Meanwhile, students who willingly accepted a “novice status” in college opened themselves up to new learning opportunities, experimentation, feedback, and guidance that helped them improve as writers throughout their education (Sommers & Saltz, 2004). Such research and my findings, then, suggest that students should embrace a mind-set of career-long learning; the professionals I interviewed who took on such a mind-set perceived themselves as more adaptable to different writing environments, genre expectations, and linguistic standards.

Taking a grounded theory approach to the interview allows us to get a firsthand interpretation of professionals’ experiences when cowriting across EP differences. Professionals reflected on their collaborative practices, differentiating between what they perceived to be productive versus unproductive responses. Furthermore, by using grounded theory in this study, I could track professionals’ decisions and behaviors across a variety of disciplines, experience levels, cultural backgrounds, workplace environments, and genders, finding that these strategies are useful in a variety of contexts and collaborative situations. In taking this approach, then, we might also consider how other differences, in addition to language proficiency, play a role in fostering productive conflict. If professionals are able to negotiate EP in productive ways, then perhaps other differences can also be negotiated and deliberated in ways that foster productive collaboration.

This research also suggests an alternative framework for how team planning should be taught in the classroom and the role that planning plays during cowriting. On one hand, the study reaffirms the importance of team planning as it relates to setting deadlines, scheduling meetings, and making time for feedback and revision. On the other hand, this study asks teachers and students to further their perception of planning beyond its temporal forms and to consider its significance as an analytical process. Even though these professionals explained that time management was important for the success of their teams, much of the planning that they discussed emphasized conversations around genre and expectations—expectations for deliverables, feedback processes, and communication between team members as well as audience expectations. Such analytic and dialogic approaches to planning thus focus on using genre analysis and team deliberations to identify differences in proficiency, genre awareness, and feedback styles and then plan how to manage them in the future.

In many ways, this research extends the impact of genre analysis beyond writing collaboration at large. In addition to thinking of genre analysis as a scaffolding tool for texts, we might consider the role it plays in planning future relationships between collaborators. In deliberating project deliverables and feedback expectations, cowriters engage in productive conflict. When writers establish a set of explicit norms, cowriters create a plan for how texts will be written, reviewed, and revised, thereby minimizing surprises and unproductive conflict that might occur later.

Although this research initially began as a search for new strategies that applied to collaborations across EP differences, the findings point to the importance of planning regardless of team composition. Teamwork researchers have long argued that collaboration does not happen without intervention; it needs to be planned. But students often complain that planning takes too long and is a waste of precious time during a project. To reframe students’ perception of planning and increase their acceptance of genre analysis, this research provides valuable evidence of professionals using and benefiting from planning within real-world collaborations. By describing the experiences of the professional collaborators in this research, then, I hope to convince students that, regardless of team composition, the process of planning scaffolds productive experiences while accounting for and managing unproductive ones. And I hope that by teaching this planning process, writing instructors can help students anticipate and mitigate some of the anxieties they might feel about collaboration.

Suggestions for Classroom Implementation

As instructors, we might begin thinking about how these strategies could manifest themselves in the classroom and the ways that we can translate these practices for students’ use. To help teachers prepare students for collaborative writing situations, the following recommendations outline some possible approaches for using this research in the classroom:

Limitations and Future Research

Although this research offers rich insight into the planning strategies used within collaborative writing, future research needs to investigate how and if professionals use these strategies in practice. The interview methods I used in this study offered rich interpretive data that stemmed from participants’ reflections and memories of their experiences. But such an approach for gathering data falls short of illustrating the dialogic aspects of how participants negotiate texts with their cowriters in situ. Because of the reflective nature of interviews, this approach does not let us see how the strategies are enacted in the moment with other collaborators or how other collaborators react to the use of these strategies. To better understand the contexts in which these strategies are practiced and the implications of their use, more research needs to be conducted on the in situ practices of cowriting across EP differences.

More research is also needed on the classroom use of these strategies. Before we can argue for the effectiveness of these strategies within the classroom, we need to better understand how to best translate these workplace practices into the classroom. The transition from the workplace to the classroom is not seamless; the differences in stakes, goals, levels of expertise, and collaborative experience vary between professionals and students. Therefore, if students are to reap the benefits of these strategies and use them to engage in productive conflict, more research is needed on how to encourage students’ use of the strategies, on how students respond to and apply these strategies in their own collaborations, and on the extent to which these strategies manage the unproductive challenges that students typically experience.