Measuring the development of foreign language writing competence

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Measuring the development of foreign language
writing competence

• Pieter de Haan Dept. of English Kees van Esch
  Dept. of Spanish
• Radboud University Nijmegen

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Dr. Pieter de HaanDepartment of EnglishRadboud
University NijmegenP.deHaan_at_let.ru.nl
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Theoretical background

• Communicative competence in writing
• Grammatical competence
• Discourse competence
• Sociolinguistic competence
• Strategic competence

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Theoretical background

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

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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)

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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

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Activities planned

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

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Data collection
Data are collected in March
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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.
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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

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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)

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Essay length (by year)
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Essay length (by group)
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Sentence length (by year)
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Sentence length (by group)
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Word length (by year)
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Word length (by group)
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Type/token ratio (by year)
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Type/token ratio (by group)
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Conclusions

• Fluency
• Sentence length
• Word length
• Type/token ratio
• Further analysis

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References

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• Connor, U. Mbaye, A. (2002). Discourse
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• De Haan, P. Van Esch, K. (2005). The
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• Grant, L. Ginther, A. (2000). Using
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