Applied Linguistic Views on Writing

Applied Linguistic Views on Writing

1. To study the process of writing

   • 1. observation
   • 2. Analysis of written work
   • 3. Think Aloud Procedure (TAP)
   • 4. Retrospection
   • 5. Diaries & Journals

2. Historical perspectives

   • Writing was neglected in the early years of L2 studies
   • L2 writing as a subdiscipline of TESL in the 1960s,
   • Writing as sentence-level structure (controlled/guided) No errors tolerated
   • Writing as discourse-level structure = Contrastive rhetoric
   • until 1970s, the teaching of L2 writing focused on the features of L2 written text
     • writing as a process (70s-80s)
       • writing as language use in context (ESP/EAP)

3. Overview of research on L2 writing

   • 1. writers' text
     • Overall quality, Linguistic accuracy, Syntactic complexity, Lexicon Content, Mechanic, Discourse features
     • experimental; causal-comparative; correlational
   • 2. process
     • general process, revision, fluency, prewriting, feedback, peer-review, tutoring, dictionary use
     • causal-comparative
     • Problems
       • 1. no tangible product
       • 2. time-consuming
       • 3. artificial settings
       • 4. coding not straighforward
       • 5. not applicable to classroom
   • 3. participants
     • attitudes of students/ teachers, raters, NES techers
     • plagiarism; qualitative
   • 4. context
     • 3. programs
     • 2. in the class
       • speech moves
     • 1. goals outside the class
       • genre analysis; intro, CS RAs