EFL Students’ Satisfaction and Challenges in Collaborative Writing in the Classroom-based Research Project
Collaboration catches a huge attention in education and research issues, especially in tertiary level. The practices of writing collaboratively in a research project have also been mushroomed in EFL university environments due to its advantages for students, lecturer, and the institution such as implementing theoretical and practical knowledge, enhancing academic soft skills and hard skills (problem solving, critical thinking, group management, communication and self-esteem), gaining public recognition, and many more. This study sought to investigate the students’ satisfaction with collaborative writing (CW) in the research project as the final task of EFL classroom instruction as well as examined the factors that have major contribution to their satisfaction. In addition, this research also explored the challenges that their actually faced during the process of CW. The result indicated that the students were satisfied with CW in their classroom-based research, even a few of them claimed that they were unsatisfied with CW because of several factors that become their challenges. Moreover, confirmatory factor analysis using PCA showed that group management and affective factors have major contribution to the students’ satisfaction with CW. Several participants also stated that the instructor’s assistance during the CW research project significantly contributed to their satisfaction. Furthermore, the obtained data indicated that mostly participants had several challenges related to ineffective communication and psychological aspects such as writing anxiety and demotivation because of their limited experience in writing research.