Beyond imitation – Five L2 writing teaching techniques that work, yet few Modern Language teachers use
December 18, 2015
"Some teachers train their students to compose in their native language first and then translate the L1 output thereby generated into the L2. This cumbersome process, however, must be utterly discouraged by teachers if they want students to attain some degree of fluency in target language writing and become more ‘spontaneous’ writers. Moreover, as Kobayashi and Rinnert (1992) found, this approach does indeed lead to more complex L2 output, but also lead to making many more errors than composing directly in the L2, for obvious reasons: the sentences language learners create when composing in their native language are usually too cognitively challenging and linguistically complex for their existing levels of L2 proficiency. Hence, the translations are bound to be inaccurate. Finally, it is this kind of approach which encourages less resilient and committed students to ‘google-translate’.
None of the above focuses the learners explicitly on the process of writing intended as the transformation of concepts or ideas (or ‘propositions’ as cognitive pyschologists call them) into words and syntactic structures...
Another strategy is to engage students in L2 reading in the belief that the language items in the articles or narratives they read in class or as assignments will be internalized and eventually resurface in their written pieces. This is not an erroneous assumption if students do read frequently and extensively in the target language.
Our take on the above is that these approaches usually work with the more talented, committed, self-reliant and highly metacognizant language learners, especially those who are highly proficient writers in their first language."
https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/c ... 2-writing/Six writing research findings that have impacted my teaching practice
"1. Baudrand-Aertker (1992) – Effects of journal writing on L2-writing proficiency
21 students of French in the third year at a high school in Louisiana were asked to keep a journal over a nine-month period. They were required to write two entries per week at least and were not engaged in any other type of writing tasks for the whole of the duration of the study. The teacher responded to the students’ journal entries focusing only on content – not on form. Using a pre-/post-test design Baudrand-Aertker found that:
The students’ written proficiency improved significantly as evidenced by the post-test and their own perception;
The students felt that the journals helped them improve their overall mastery of the target language;
The students reported positive attitudes towards the activity;
The vast majority of the students did not want to be corrected on their grammatical mistakes when engaging in journal writing.
Although this study has important limitations in that there was no control group to compare the independent variable’ effects with, I find the results interesting and I intend to give journal-writing a try myself next year.
Cooper and Morain (1980) – Effects of sentence combining instruction
The researchers investigated the effect of grammar instruction involving sentence combining tasks on the essay writing of 130 third quarter students of French. The subjects were divided into two groups: the experimental group received 60 to 150 minutes instruction per week through sentence combining exercises whilst the control group was taught ‘traditionally’ through workbook exercises. The experimental group outperformed the control group on seven of the nine measures of syntactic complexity adopted. Although the study did not look at the overall quality of the informants’ essays but only at the syntactic complexity, its findings are very interesting and has encouraged me to incorporate sentence combining tasks more regularly in my teaching strategies. Here is an discussion of the merits of sentence combining instruction and how it can be implemented:
https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/2 ... chers-use/Florez Estrada (1995) – Effects of interactive writing via computer as compared to traditional journaling
In this small scale study (28 university students of Spanish) Florez-Estrada compared a group of learners exchanging e-mail and chatting online with native-speaking partners with another group of students engaged in interactive paper writing with their teachers. The researcher found that the computer group outperformed the control group on the accuracy of key grammar points such as preterite vs imperfect, ‘ser’ vs ‘estar’, ‘por’ vs ‘para’ and others. The findings of this study were echoed by another study of 40 German students, Itzes (1940), which involved students in chatting via computer amongst themselves in the TL. A notable feature of this study is that the students chose the topics they wanted to chat about. These two studies confirms finding from my own practice; I often use Edmodo or Facebook to create a slow student-initiated chat on given topics in which the whole class is involved, every students sharing their opinions/comments with their peers with the assistance of the dictionaries. I have found this activity very beneficial even with groups of less able learners.
Nummikoski (1991) and Caruso (1994) – Effects of extensive L2-reading on L2-writing proficiency as contrasted with written practice.
Both studies investigated if L2 learners who are engaged in extensive L2-reading (with no writing instruction/practice) write more effectively than L2 learners who are involved in writing tasks but do no reading. The results of both studies show a significant advantage for the writing-only condition. These studies, which are by no means flawless, do challenge the commonly held assumption that we can improve our students’ writing proficiency by engaging them in extensive reading.
Martinez-Lage (1992) – Comparison of focus-on-form with focus-on-form-free writing
The researcher investigated the impact of two writing-task types on the writing output of 23 second-year university Spanish students. The same students were asked to write (a) typical assigned compositions and (b) dialogue journals in which they were told they would not be assessed on grammar accuracy. The surprising finding was that the syntactic complexity across both task types was equivalent but the focus-on-form-free task type (journal writing) was grammatically more accurate. I concur with Martinez-Lage on this one as I have tried this strategy myself with many of my AS groups over the years."
https://gianfrancoconti.wordpress.com/c ... 2-writing/How about editing? Some insights from proofreading research
Proofreading theories and research provide us with the following important insights in the mechanisms that regulate essay editing. Firstly, proofreading involves different processes from reading: when one proofreads a passage, one is generally looking for misspellings, words that might have been omitted or repeated, typographical mistakes, etc., and as a result, comprehension is not the goal. When one is reading a text, on the other hand, one’s primary goal is comprehension. Thus, reading involves construction of meaning, while proofreading involves visual search. For this reason, in reading, short function words, not being semantically salient, are not fixated (Paap, Newsome, McDonald and Schvaneveldt, 1982). Consequently, errors on such words are less likely to be spotted when one is editing a text concentrating mostly on its meaning than when one is focusing one’s attention on the text as part of a proofreading task (Haber and Schindler, 1981). Errors are likely to decrease even further when the proofreader is forced to fixate on every single function word in isolation (Haber and Schindler, 1981).
It should also be noted that some proofreader’s errors appear to be due to acoustic coding. This refers to the phenomenon whereby the way a proofreader pronounces a word/diphthong/letter influences his/her detection of an error. For example, if an English learner of L2-Italian pronounces the ‘e’ in the singular noun ‘stazione’ (= train station) as [i] instead of [e], s/he will find it difficult to differentiate it from the plural ‘stazioni’ (= train stations). This may impinge on her/his ability to spot errors with that word involving the use of the singular for the plural and vice versa.
The implications for language learning are that learners may have be trained to go through their essays at least once focusing exclusively on form. Secondly, they should be asked to pay particular attention to those words (e.g. function words) and parts of words (e.g. verb endings) that they may not perceive as semantically salient.
Bilingual written production: adapting the first language model
Writing, although slower than speaking, is still processed at enormous speed in mature native speakers’ WSTM. The processing time required by a writer will be greater in the L2 than in the L1 and will increase at lower levels of proficiency: at the Wording stage, more time will be needed to match non-proceduralized lexical materials to propositions; at the Presenting stage, more time will be needed to select and retrieve the right grammatical form. Furthermore, more attentional effort will be required in rehearsing the sentence plans in WSTM; in fact, just like Hotopf’s (1980) young L1-writers, non- proficient L2-learners may be able to store in WSTM only two or three words at a time. This has implications for Agreement in Italian, French or Spanish in view of the fact that words more than three-four words distant from one another may still have to agree in gender and number."
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