Enhancing EFL Students' Collaboration in a Blended Learning Environment: A Design-Based Research

Collaboration is widely accepted as one of the essential skills for the 21st century. Based on social constructivist theory, collaboration has been gradually extended to synchronous and asynchronous online collaboration supported with Web 2.0 technologies. The purpose of this paper is to explore effective strategies to enhance EFL students' synchronous and asynchronous collaboration both distributed and face-to-face learning environments. Dillenbourg's (1999) four criteria (situation, interactions, processes and effects) for collaborative learning would be applied to develop proposed strategies that define the collaboration situation, encourage interactions during the collaboration, facilitate the collaboration processes and measure specific learning outcomes. Perez-Sanagustin et al.'s (2012) 4SPPIces model would be used as a reference to further modify the proposed collaboration strategies in the blended learning environment. A design-based research would be conducted to test out the effects of the proposed strategies and shed light on rewarding modifications to the strategies. Participants would be 120 freshmen who are enrolled in a college English course in one of the universities in mainland China. A three-cycle of iterative experiment would be conducted to collect both qualitative and quantitative data. Among which, qualitative data include records of students' interactions and collaboration processes in class and out of class, student products, student feedbacks in the interviews; whereas, quantitative data would be composed of students' perceptions of the collaboration situation, effects on their collaboration capabilities.