Ankara : The Department of Teaching English as a Foreign Language, the Institute of Economics and Social Sciences, Bilkent University, 2001.Thesis (Master's) -- Bilkent University, 2001.Includes bibliographical references leaves77-80.Writing is generally thought to be a difficult, boring, and complex job as a skill
to be taught and learned. These properties of writing might result in learners’ having
negative attitudes towards writing. The purpose of this study was applying
collaborative writing at Anadolu University Preparatory School (AUPS) to see the
effects of it on learners’ attitudes towards writing. This study was done to find the
answers to these questions: 1) What are the effects of collaborative writing on
students’ attitudes towards writing? 2) Does “level” have a significant role on change
of learners’ attitudes? I had null hypotheses including that collaboration in writing
does not have any positive effect on attitudes of learners towards writing and
proficiency levels do not have a significant role in terms of attitudes towards writing.
The participants were 61 upper-intermediate and advanced level students at
AUPS whose ages were from 17 to 21. Participants were male and female. Two
questionnaires were used in the study. Each questionnaire was given twice. The firstquestionnaire, which included question items about general attitudes towards writing
was given before the first collaborative writing workshop as the pre-treatment
questionnaire. The second, which had question items about attitudes towards
collaborative writing was administered after the first collaborative writing workshop.
The second questionnaire was given once more after the fourth collaborative writing
workshop and the first questionnaire was administered as post-treatment at the end of
the study. The whole data collection procedure lasted one month.
Data were analyzed by t-test and correlation. T-test was used to see the
significance of difference between the first and the fourth questionnaires; and also
between the second and the third questionnaires. Correlation was used within the first
and the fourth questionnaires to see the relationship between the attitudes towards
writing in general and towards collaborative writing according to the responses to the
question items about both types available in those two questionnaires. The results
showed that before treatment the students at AUPS had negative attitudes towards
writing and that they had not tried collaborative writing before. The results also
indicated that negative attitudes towards writing turned into positive ones after the
collaborative writing workshops. In addition the study results indicated that the
positive change in attitudes is related to the collaborative writing. Another result of
this study is that there is no significant difference between the two proficiency levels;
upper-intermediate and advanced.Gökçe, İlkayM.S
