Group concept mapping strategies for collaborative continuation tasks

The continuation task, which involves reading an unfinished story and completing its ending, offers good potential for language learning. To enhance students' story-ending writing abilities, this study proposes two types of concept mapping strategies: group filling-in-the-blanks of a teacher-constructed guided map and group concept mapping, both of which are meant to help students clarify storylines by visualizing a story onto a concept map. A quasi-experiment was conducted in three classes. Students in Class 1 collaboratively filled in the blanks on a concept map and then wrote completions to three stories. In Class 2, students collaboratively constructed their own concept map and then wrote completions to the same stories. Class 3 students collaboratively wrote completions to the same stories without any concept mapping. Students’ story completions, diaries, responses to questionnaires, the researcher's observation notes, and teacher interviews were collected and analyzed using ANOVAs (Analysis of variance), paired-sample t-tests and thematic and domain analysis. The results showed that concept mapping strategies assisted students’ story-ending writing quality with students achieving higher scores when using the group concept mapping strategy compared to those not using any mapping strategies. Nine interactive patterns were identified, with the collaborative pattern dominating, and these patterns evolved dynamically as the co-continuation tasks proceeded. Overall, both students and teachers perceived the proposed strategies positively.

读未完成的故事并为其续写结尾，为语言学习提供了可能性。为提升学生的续写能力，本研究提出两种概念图策略：小组填补教师构建的引导图和小组绘制概念图，旨在通过概念图可视化故事内容帮助学生梳理情节发展。研究者在三个班级进行了准实验。第一班学生以小组形式协作填补概念图空白，并续写三个故事结尾；第二班学生协作构建概念图，然后续写相同故事结尾；第三班学生协作续写相同故事的结尾，但不使用概念图策略。研究者收集了学生的续作，日记和问卷、观察笔记和教师的访谈，并采用方差分析、配对样本t检验以及主题和领域分析方法进行数据分析。结果显示，概念图策略有助于提高学生的续作质量。协作构建概念图的学生续写得分较高，而不使用任何概念图策略的学生得分较低。此外，学生协作续写故事过程展示了九种互动模式，以协作模式为主导；这些模式在协同续写任务进行过程中是动态变化的。总体而言，学生和教师对使用概念图辅助完成读后续写任务持有积极态度。