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Measuring the development of foreign language writing competence

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Title: Measuring the development of foreign language writing competence


1
Measuring the development of foreign language
writing competence
  • Pieter de Haan Dept. of English Kees van Esch
    Dept. of Spanish
  • Radboud University Nijmegen

2
Dr. Pieter de HaanDepartment of EnglishRadboud
University NijmegenP.deHaan_at_let.ru.nl
3
Theoretical background
  • Communicative competence in writing
  • Grammatical competence
  • Discourse competence
  • Sociolinguistic competence
  • Strategic competence

4
Theoretical background
  • Differences between L1 and L2/FL writing
  • Fluency
  • Accuracy
  • Quality
  • Coherence
  • Similarities between L1 and L2/FL writing
  • Strategies
  • Global approach
  • Objectives

5
Theoretical 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)

6
Project 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

7
Activities planned
  • Collecting essays
  • 2002
  • 2003
  • 2004
  • 2005
  • Qualitative and quantitative study of corpus data

8
Data collection
Data are collected in March
9
Prompt 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.
10
Methodology
  • 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

11
Basic 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)

12
Essay length (by year)
13
Essay length (by group)
14
Sentence length (by year)
15
Sentence length (by group)
16
Word length (by year)
17
Word length (by group)
18
Type/token ratio (by year)
19
Type/token ratio (by group)
20
Conclusions
  • Fluency
  • Sentence length
  • Word length
  • Type/token ratio
  • Further analysis

21
References
  • Biber, D. (1988). Variation across speech and
    writing. Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
  • Biber, D. (1995). Dimensions of register
    variation A crosslinguistic comparison.
    Cambridge Cambridge University Press.
  • Canale, M. (1983). From communicative competence
    to communicative language pedagogy. In J.C.
    Richards R. Schmidt (Eds.), Language and
    Communication (pp. 227). London Longman.
  • Canale, M. Swain, M. (1980). Theoretical bases
    of communicative approaches to second language
    teaching and testing. Applied Linguistics, 1,
    147.
  • Connor, U. Mbaye, A. (2002). Discourse
    approaches to writing assessment. Annual Review
    of Applied Linguistics, 22, 263278.
  • De Haan, P. Van Esch, K. (2005). The
    development of writing in English and Spanish as
    foreign languages, in Assessing Writing, 10
    100116.
  • Grant, L. Ginther, A. (2000). Using
    computertagged linguistic features to describe
    L2 writing differences. Journal of Second
    Language Writing, 9, 123145.
  • Neff, J., Dafouz, E., Diez, M., Prieto, R.,
    Chaudron, C. (1998). Contrastive discourse
    analysis Argumentative text in English and
    Spanish. Paper presented at the TwentyFourth
    University of WisconsinMilwaukee Linguistics
    Symposium.
  • Ortega, L. (2003). Syntactic complexity measures
    and their relationship to L2 proficiency A
    research synthesis of collegelevel L2 writing.
    Applied Linguistics, 24, 492518.
  • Polio, C. (2001). Research methodology in L2
    writing assessment. In T. Silva P.K. Matsuda
    (Eds.), On second language writing (91115).
    Mahwah, New Jersey Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
  • Roca de Larios, P., Murphy, L., Marín, J.
    (2002). A critical examination of L2 writing
    process research. In Ransdel, S. M.L. Barbier
    (Eds.), New directions for research in L2 writing
    (1147). Dordrecht Kluwer Academic Publishers.
  • Silva, T. (1993). Toward an understanding of the
    distinct nature of L2 writing The ESL research
    and its implication, TESOL Quarterly, 27,
    657677.
  • Wolfe-Quintero, K., Inagaki, S., Kim, H.-Y.
    (1998). Second language development in writing
    Measures of fluency, accuracy, and complexity.
    Technical Report No. 17. Honolulu, HI University
    of Hawaii, Second Language Teaching and
    Curriculum Center.
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