The The dialogic nature of regulation in collaborative digital argumentative writing practices

Abstract

This article discusses the dialogic nature of regulating perspectives on a controversial topic during students’ argumentative writing in remote teaching. The emerging collaborative writing processes mediated by digital technology are importantly changed as responses to physical distancing in education, as demanded by the measures of biosecurity established by the national government to prevent the transmission of COVID-19. Our analysis is framed in a sociocultural perspective, which contributes to our understanding of the concepts related to dialogism, regulation, positionings on a topic, collaborative writing, and digital technology as a tool for dialogic interaction. Our qualitative, idiographic study analyzes the argumentative utterances produced by a dyad of students enrolled in a Textual Production course at a Colombian public university who write a critical commentary over four (4) weeks using Google Docs application. The findings indicate that the participants discuss and negotiate decisions in the group writing situation and that during this dialogic interaction, the ideas are influenced by the thoughts of the other. When they communicate with each other, their discourses regulate their positionings on the social situation that is the subject of the dialogue. It is also possible to identify both the possibilities of the pedagogical mode and its potential limitations for dialogic interaction, which synchronously and asynchronously facilitate or restrict the performance of the joint writing activity. It can be concluded that within the framework of remote teaching, digital technology has become a flexible mode of pedagogical practice that supports dialogic interaction, enables regulation among peers for discussion, negotiation, and positioning on a topic, and facilitates the construction of collective knowledge that emerges in argumentative collaborative writing.