Recent approaches to writing have viewed it as an interactive process both requiring and reinforcing social interaction and collaboration in EFL classrooms (Storch, 2013). The present study aimed to comparatively investigate the effects of collaborative writing and peer-editing feedback on the quality of individual writing. A number of 55 learners enrolling in Essay Writing courses were randomly put in three groups, namely the Collaborative (N=7 triads), the Peer-editing (N=8 pairs), and the Individual (N=18 learners) groups. The groups completed six writing tasks. In the Collaborative group, all the stages of the writing cycle from topic-selection to final product were carried out within the triads. In the Peer-editing group, the pairs wrote their tasks individually and only collaborated on the feedback stage. The Individual group served as a control in which the participants carried out all the writing stages independently. All of the participants wrote an individual writing task and completed an attitude questionnaire, which aimed at investigating general attitudes towards writing, before and after the treatment. Writing quality of the individually produced tasks in pre-test and post-test was rated by two raters according to Brown and Bailey’s (1984) analytic scale in terms of organization, content, grammar, mechanics, and style and quality of expression. The results of one-way ANOVA analysis of the writing scores indicated that both collaboration and peer-editing feedback improved the writing quality significantly. But the learners’ attitudes ware more in favor of peer-editing rather than collaborative writing. The findings are discussed in light of sociocultural and interactionist perspectives along with their implications for writing instructors.
