Title: Measuring the development of foreign language writing competence
1Measuring the development of foreign language
writing competence
- Pieter de Haan Dept. of English Kees van Esch
Dept. of Spanish - Radboud University Nijmegen
2Dr. Pieter de HaanDepartment of EnglishRadboud
University NijmegenP.deHaan_at_let.ru.nl
3Theoretical background
- Communicative competence in writing
- Grammatical competence
- Discourse competence
- Sociolinguistic competence
- Strategic competence
4Theoretical background
- Differences between L1 and L2/FL writing
- Fluency
- Accuracy
- Quality
- Coherence
- Similarities between L1 and L2/FL writing
- Strategies
- Global approach
- Objectives
5Theoretical background
- Learner corpora
- Categories (Polio 2001)
- Assessing development
- Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998)
- Neff et al. (1998)
- Grant Ginther (2000)
- Ortega (2003)
- de Haan van Esch (2005)
6Project goals
- Develop an instrument that can help the teacher
to assess FL English and Spanish writing progress
in qualitative and quantitative terms - Learn more about how FL students compose their
writing both in first versions and in revisions
7Activities planned
- Collecting essays
- 2002
- 2003
- 2004
- 2005
- Qualitative and quantitative study of corpus data
8Data collection
Data are collected in March
9Prompt for essays
Students in the departments of English and
Spanish wrote three essays at a one-year
interval - on the same prompt, asking them to
select their preferred source of news and give
specific reasons to support their preference (30
minutes max.) (cf. Grant Ginther, 2000). The
prompt was given in Dutch. Students were also
invited to spend a further 15 minutes writing
down (in Dutch) how they felt their writing had
improved.
10Methodology
- Holistic assessment
- Individual ranking by three independent assessors
- Quantitative analysis of text features
- Average essay length
- Average sentence length
- Average word length
- Type/token ratio
11Basic statistics
- Total essays 69
- Mean essay length 2002 300 wordsRange 133 ?
528 (SD 100.83) - Mean essay length 2003 392 wordsRange 215 ?
570 (SD 112.94) - Mean essay length 2004 382 wordsRange 201 ?
613 (SD 96.90)
12Essay length (by year)
13Essay length (by group)
14Sentence length (by year)
15Sentence length (by group)
16Word length (by year)
17Word length (by group)
18Type/token ratio (by year)
19Type/token ratio (by group)
20Conclusions
- Fluency
- Sentence length
- Word length
- Type/token ratio
- Further analysis
21References
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