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Motivation to write and collaboration via chat among struggling secondary school students

Marie-Ève Gonthier, Natalie Lavoie and Chantal Ouellet
This article is a translation of:
Motivation à écrire et collaboration par clavardage chez des élèves du secondaire en difficulté [fr]

Editor's notes

The full-length version of this article (varia) is available at: https://journals.openedition.org/reperes/4395

Full text

1Many students experience writing difficulties and have little motivation to write a text. If these difficulties are to be addressed, it is important to investigate what tools can be used to support them. Chat, which is very popular among adolescents, is still not frequently used in the classroom. The objective of this study is to describe the motivation to write of struggling secondary school pupils in special needs classes in Quebec during two writing tasks: a text written individually on a computer and a text written in collaboration using a chat platform during the planning and revision phases.

2Students (aged between 12 and 15) from four classes in different schools (40 in total) participated in the study. Students from two classes (from the same school) wrote the texts, while the students from the other two classes (from another school) supported them by chatting online during the planning and revision stages.

3In order to describe their motivation with regard to the two writing contexts (individual on a computer and in collaboration using the chat), the students who carried out the writing tasks completed a motivational questionnaire at the end of each task to assessing their sense of personal efficacy, their interest in the task and the value they attached to it; their proficiency, performance and avoidance goals; and what, for them, constituted success. A few open-response questions also allowed us to elicit their opinions of the tasks

4On the basis of the responses they provided, despite some differences for certain motivational variables, we cannot conclude that the students are more motivated in one writing context than in another. Nonetheless, their answers to the open-response questions relating to the two different contexts highlight that more of them enjoyed the writing task using the chat platform.

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References

Electronic reference

Marie-Ève Gonthier, Natalie Lavoie and Chantal Ouellet, “Motivation to write and collaboration via chat among struggling secondary school students”Repères [Online], 64 | 2021, Online since 14 March 2022, connection on 20 June 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/reperes/4709; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/reperes.4709

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About the authors

Marie-Ève Gonthier

Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada

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Natalie Lavoie

Université du Québec à Rimouski, Canada

By this author

Chantal Ouellet

Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada

By this author

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Copyright

CC-BY-NC-ND-4.0

The text only may be used under licence CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. All other elements (illustrations, imported files) are “All rights reserved”, unless otherwise stated.

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