Friendship and collaborative creative writing in the primary classroom

A case study is reported investigating the nature of paired talk and the role of friendship in collaborative creative writing activities. This forms the initial phase of a larger research project driven by socio-cultural theory, studying the beneficial effects of friendship pairing and the role of the computer tool in the development of creative writing skills. The joint poem writing episodes of four 8-year-old girls, one friendship and one acquaintance pair, were observed on a number of occasions during a two-week long literacy project. The observations were of ongoing classroom activities in the IT suite and in the literacy classroom of their school; the observed children worked alongside the rest of the class in their natural context. It was predicted that there would be differences between the two pairs in terms of the process and the outcome of their collaborations which could be explained by the differences in their respective relationships. To investigate such differences (if any), a 'functional model' of discourse analysis was used, developed specifically for the context of collaborative creative writing. It is claimed that the proposed model is useful to describe discourse patterns characteristic of paired writing and to identify productive discourse styles in this specific setting. It helps to understand how the collaborating writers engage in talk to cope with the demands of the task, and how they use discourse to support different phases of the joint writing process.