Omani University Students’ Attitudes Towards Collaborative Writing

This paper examined the students’ attitudes, based on their cultural background, towards collaborative writing (CW). The participants included 215 undergraduate students from a large public university in the Sultanate of Oman and the instrument used was a questionnaire designed for the study. The results show that students’ general attitudes towards CW are largely neutral to slightly positive on some of the scales. Students acknowledged that CW improves the quality of writing, with a focus on lower-order thinking skills like grammar and vocabulary. Few students said that CW helped them with higher-order thinking skills such as organization. With respect to the influence of their cultural background on their comfort level with CW activities, the results suggest that special attention should be given when pairing or grouping students since students are not comfortable working with the opposite gender or about giving feedback to their peers. In general, results reveal that students need to be taught how to collaborate in their writing classes.