Abstract
Due to the popularity of Facebook all over the world, a number of researchers have been interested in the application of Facebook to second language learning (Blattner & Fiori, 2011; Kabilan et al., 2010; Mitchell, 2012). With the multitude of audience and students’ everyday literacy practice of Facebook, Facebook has been promised to be an optimal environment to learn English writing. Furthermore, Facebook has the potential to improve writing skills in terms of writing purpose and consideration of audience when students are asked to recall the strategies they used in online informal writing experiences and encouraged to apply these strategies to academic writing (Yancey, 2009). Research indicated that Facebook helped students improve writing skills (Shih, 2011; Yunus & Salehi, 2012; Yunus et al., 2012). Some studies discovered the role of audience of Facebook in shaping the written texts or encouraging students to employ various writing strategies (Depew, 2011; West, 2013). Although previous literature has shed light on the ways Facebook is used to language learning and especially English writing, few empirical studies examined how interactions on Facebook help students improve writing skills and develop writer identities. To fill the gap, the purpose of this study is to investigate how Facebook facilitate student writing and develop their writer identities by drawing on the theory of collaborative dialogue (Swain, 2000). This study asks the following questions: (1) What are the characteristics of students’ interaction on the Facebook? (2) How does the collaborative dialogue of Facebook help students refine writing compositions and improve writing skills? (3) How do students develop their writer identities via the collaborative dialogue of Facebook? This study was conducted with 16 students from a writing class in a college in Taiwan. The students were divided into four groups; each group had to complete a collaborative writing task of a narrative essay or an argumentative essay on Facebook in a semester. They brainstormed ideas, wrote two cycles of writing, responded to peers’ writing, revised their own compositions on Facebook. Eight students were recruited for three individual interviews in order to know their identity transformation during the semester. Data were collected through Facebook online logs, repeated interviews with students, students’ reflection journal entries, and students’ compositions. As for data analyses, the categories of topics were mainly based on some categories from Liu and Sadler (2003) and the pilot study. Besides, content analysis was used to show the themes in relation to writing skills and writer identities. Results suggest that the students talked a wide variety of topics on Facebook, including task management, suggestions, evaluation, alternation, clarification, call for involvement, and responses to readers/ co-authors. Through talking with peers, the students not only improved the language use in their compositions (e.g. grammar correction, vocabulary use, and length of sentences), but polished the employment of writing skills (e.g. elaboration of ideas, organization, and quotations) as well. Additionally, Facebook helped endow the students with a sense of writer identity as a confident writer who can understand their strengths of writing from peer feedback, discuss writing difficulties with peers, consider audience’s background knowledge, and even regard writing as a self-challenging task rather than completing the task merely for submitting a required assignment via Facebook interaction. More importantly, Facebook per se has the potential to benefit students in appealing to the audience and claiming the responsibility of the writing content due to the interaction feature of Facebook, which signaled the development of writer identity. With the findings presented in the study, Facebook can serve as an optimal platform for English writing instruction and development of writer identity. Future studies can implement different kinds of writing tasks and genres to compare the effects of Facebook writing integrated with different tasks or genres or use different sources, such as picture, music, videos, or other hyperlinks, in Facebook writing.