Metalinguistic activity in a collaborative writing task in Primary Education

Several studies have underscored the importance of the metalinguistic activity generated in collaborative writing tasks for the development of students' writing competence. However, few of them have analyzed it in primary education contexts. This paper investigates the focus of the metalinguistic activity generated by nine pairs of fifth graders (10-11 years-old) in the prewriting, writing and revision stages of the collaborative production of a fable after a teaching intervention about this genre. To this aim, the episodes produced in the oral interactions were identified and analyzed in terms of focus and frequency. Results show that most episodes deal with textual and mechanical aspects, and that their focus varies according to the aims of the different stages of the task: text organization in the prewriting stage, and correction -focused merely on spelling- in the revision stage. The results obtained are discussed in relation to the effects of the intervention, the students' cognitive maturity and the kind of correction usually made at school. Pedagogical recommendations are also given.