Process writing has long been used in English-language composition and English as a Second Language courses, and in recent years it has been adopted in foreign language classes as well. Nevertheless, many teachers and learners still see foreign language writing as an exercise in perfecting grammar and vocabulary. Explicit instruction on the process of insightful writing is unusual in the foreign language classroom. This article presents a study of third-year Spanish courses and addresses (1) whether the different modalities of error correction promote improvement of writing skills , and (2) whether students’ awareness of the processes of reading and writing favors the development of the necessary abilities that will be required in more advanced courses. This study identifies the processes that allow students to acknowledge and address strengths and weaknesses that are not necessarily tied to grammatical competence. Findings show that regardless of the explicitness of the corrections, students performed better when electronic feedback was used and when they were aware of both reading and writing processes.
The field of second language (L2) writing has raised theoretical concerns about how students improve writing skills. While some authors have looked into process writing as the optimum way to improve the skill (Roca de Larios, et al, 2002; Susser, 1994; Scott, 1996; Zamel, 1983), others have explored the effects of error feedback on writing proficiency (Ferris, 1995, 1999; Truscott, 1996, 1999; Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Robb, Ross, and Shortreed, 1986; Semke, 1984; Lalande, 1982), and the processes involved in reading-to-write (Carson, 1993; Flower, et al., 1990; Ruiz-Funes, 2001).
Since the 1970s, studies present writing as a
“recursive, nonlinear cognitive process in which the writer moves back and
forth between prewriting, writing, revising, and editing until he/she is
satisfied with his/her creation” (Flower and Hayes, 1981). Research in the last
10 years has moved towards a more comprehensive theory of L2 writing, and an
examination of the notion that first language (L1) and L2 writing are the same
“has led L2 writing specialists to rely for direction almost exclusively on L1
composition theories…” (Silva, 1993). Reichelt (1999) has found an increase in
studies on foreign language (FL) writing—other than English—since 1990. She has
also noticed that many of the researchers consider themselves language teachers
rather than writing teachers, thus supporting the notion that “FL writing is
currently seen more as ‘foreign language’ than ‘writing’” (p. 182).
This study contributes to the discussion by incorporating several strategies into an intermediate course of the language sequence at a large state university that has become—based on students’ observations collected over the past five years—a place where many undergo a difficult transition between lower- and upper-division courses. The observations of students’ struggle to improve their foreign language skills raised the questions of whether certain conditions favor or hinder the development of necessary abilities that are required in advanced courses.
Kern and Schultz (1992) indicate that preparation of students is crucial to promotion because “in the upper-level courses students are expected to read articles and literary selections and to react and respond to them in an insightful and critical manner” (p. 2). Ruiz-Funes (1999) also emphasizes the contrast in tasks in advanced courses where “reading and writing requirements begin to demand more higher-order cognitive skills, instruction tends to focus on the mastery of the linguistic elements; and teachers tend to use writing-process and reading-process instruction independently from each other” (p. 45). Explicit instruction in the processes of critical reading and insightful writing is unusual in the FL classroom. As Kern and Schultz point out, some teachers and learners still see FL writing as an exercise in perfecting grammar and vocabulary:
Writing in lower-division language courses traditionally consists of fill-in-the-blank workbook exercises and occasional descriptive essays about personal topics such as friends, family, and vacations. In these writing tasks, the focus is usually on surface feature accuracy rather than on the development, organization, and effective expression of the students’ own thoughts or ideas (p. 2).
This study investigates the conditions that favor the development of writing skills and questions whether some areas are not meant to be improved at this point.
The term process writing, as used in this project, refers to pre-writing, drafting, feedback, and revising, as part of a non-linear model. It follows the two tenets of process writing as described by Susser (1994): awareness and intervention. The concept also departs from the personal introspective paradigm prevalent in L1 and L2 writing courses that obviously addresses more advanced writers than those who participated in this study.
According to Ruiz-Funes (1999), research on reading-to-write in FL belongs to two categories: (a) narrowing the intermediate/advanced-level gap, and (b) teaching literature in order to develop higher cognitive skills. Students in advanced levels are often required to write essays for which previous work has not prepared them intellectually. Since intermediate writing is usually circumscribed to narration and description, students lack the necessary tools to approach writing an argumentative essay and “engage in a complex process that includes exploration of a problem, evaluation of facts and evidences, generation and testing of hypotheses in relation to new ideas an evidence” (p. 521). In order to overcome these problems, students need to be aware that good writing is not just grammatically accurate and that other factors, such as organization, coherence, and use of cohesive devices, are essential elements of good writing.
This study also compares the use of handwritten comments to electronic corrections and their effects on students revisions of composition errors. For the handwritten comments, two items were implemented: an adaptation of the Essay Correction Code (ECCO) and the Error Awareness Sheet (EASE) (Lalande, 1982). For the electronic corrections Ferris’ (2001) model of “treatable” and “untreatable” errors was adopted. (Appendix A)
The adaptation of L1 process writing approach into FL writing practices seems to have taken one of its least pedagogical modalities, breaking down the process into stages that “not only violate[s] what we know about the recursive nature of writing, it distorts a responsible pedagogy into a didactic one” (Susser, 1994: 35). Although English as a Second Language (ESL) writing theory is already in the “post-process” era, addressing genre and social issues, it is still necessary to point out the controversy about process writing. In his detailed discussion of process approaches in L2 writing, Susser mentions that disagreement was caused by the association of process pedagogies with numerous writing theories, the gap between educational theory and practice and the fact that process became a synonym for theories of writing. Process writing emerged as a response to pedagogies that emphasized the composed product rather than the writing process. Process writing is characterized by the awareness of the writer of the writing process and the intervention of a teacher, or peers, at any time during the process of writing in order to improve writing skills instead of exclusively fixing mistakes (pp. 34-35). In foreign language studies (i.e., other than ESL or EFL [English as a Foreign Language]) writing progress has been measured by accuracy. Similarly, Dvorak (1986) concludes that beyond the intermediate level “composition skill has been defined primarily in terms of language development” demonstrated by the main preoccupation of research that focuses on “how to reduce and repair error damage” (p. 162).
Reading-to-write
Reading-to-write is defined as tasks that require students to write an essay based on the reading of an assigned source text. Such tasks may require students to read texts that have a variety of topics and orientations (Ruiz-Funes, 1999; Kern and Schultz, 1992). Stein’s (1990) reading-to-write-in-L1-hypothesis proposes the following steps: (1) Monitoring: the writer uses the original text to supervise his/her progress; (2) elaborating: the writer combines the source text with prior knowledge of the topic creating new ideas; (3) structuring: the writer reorganizes information from the source to the new text; and (4) planning: the writer moves from reading to writing. If reading-to-write were similar in L2 and L1, it would be necessary to look at the cognitive processes involved in the act of reading in order to understand it and help students develop the skill. In addition to all of the cognitive processes, however the FL student has to decode the text in order to interact with it.
Most students expect and value the feedback they receive in writing, and research has shown that there seems to be a connection between active correction of errors and improvement in writing skills. Ferris (1995) emphasizes the importance that students give to writing accurately and their perceived need to obtain corrections from the instructor. An important factor mentioned by Truscott (1996) —who, incidentally, opposes grammar correction—is the necessity of not treating every linguistic category (lexicon, syntax, and morphology) as equivalent since these categories represent separate learning domains that are acquired during different stages and through different processes. Nevertheless, most researchers (Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Robb, Ross, and Shortreed, 1986; Semke, 1984; Lalande, 1982) agree that corrections are useful for the students as long as they are consistent and systematic. In his study about the effects of graded versus ungraded compositions, Chastain (1990) found that although there was no significant difference between the number and types of errors, “in some ways the expectation of a grade may influence student’s writing in some positive ways…. Students in this study wrote longer papers containing longer sentences and a higher number of complex sentences” (p. 14). Corrections place an importance on what is corrected, thus exclusive surface-level error correction places emphasis on form.
Over the years, correction of written production has provoked some controversy. Several studies (Ferris and Roberts, 2001; Terry, 1989; Zamel, 1985; Lalande, 1982) endorse differing approaches to written correction, which can be separated into two main categories: (a) explicit (direct): the instructor indicates the error and provides the correct form and (b) non-explicit (indirect): the instructor marks the error in some fashion (underlined, highlighted, coded, etc.) and the student has to decide the correction. Some researchers (Chastain, 1990; Scott, 1996; Ruiz-Funes 2001) have adapted Lalande’s (1982) ECCO to provide students with an indication of the type of errors without giving the correct answer. This procedure has become a common classroom practice that encourages learning through problem-solving. Ferris and Roberts (2001) established five main categories of errors—verbs, noun-endings, articles, lexicon, and sentences structure (p. 169), and she has found that by using these five categories students are more successful at correcting errors even in such areas as word choice and sentence structure. In a different study Ferris (1999) classifies errors as treatable (patterned and rule-governed) or untreatable for which there is no set of rules that students can consult to avoid making mistakes. For these errors she recommends a combination of direct correction and a set of strategies exclusive to this type of error.
For language
students it is very important to
understand that there is no ideal model for writing and that they are not being
compared to native speakers, or more proficient classmates. Instructors need to
remember that one cannot expect the second language learner to be able to write
like an educated native speaker. As
Yates and Kenkel (2002) point out, “To compare the learners’ knowledge to
native speaker knowledge commits the comparative fallacy and provides
incomplete insight into what principles the learner had” (p. 34). Therefore,
the scoring instrument should reflect the kinds of tasks that are done in the
classroom.
This research examines the following research questions:
1. What effect do different
modalities of error correction have
on students’ self-editing abilities?
2. What is the effect of awareness of the processes of reading and writing on
quality of writing?
Participants
The participants are 35 university students enrolled in Intermediate Spanish III (fifth-semester). In order to ensure the homogeneity of the sample all participants: (a) were native speakers of English, (b) had received two to four semesters of formal instruction in Spanish at the university level, (c) had scored 80% or less on the listening comprehension pretest, and (d) scored less than 80% on a diagnostic composition. Participants in group A (n = 16) were selected out of 25 students who took the course; group B participants (n = 19) were selected out of 32 students. Only those participants who met all criteria above listed were included in the study. The score in the diagnostic test (less than 80%) was determined as representative of the average student’s writing at this institution. Both sections were taught by the researcher in consecutive semesters.
The fifth-semester course places an emphasis on the development of the four skills necessary to succeed in advanced courses. Grammar is never explicitly discussed. Students are encouraged to identify structures with which they have problems and work on them either by talking to the professor, consulting a tutor, or downloading handouts from the online course management system Web Course Tools (WebCT).
This study examines 140 samples of a corpus of N = 280 (first draft and final version of the two compositions). The first composition is used for diagnostic purposes and is part of other diagnostic instruments that measure motivation, grammatical judgment, listening comprehension, and oral proficiency. Students are also asked to rank the importance of language skills (Appendix A) using a survey adapted from Alalou and Chamberlain (1999).
In contrast, students in Group B (n = 19) submitted 15 reading comprehension exercises corresponding to class assignments. The entries were marked for content, organization, and accuracy. Students turned in their writing portfolio twice during the semester for a grade. Full credit was given only if all corrections had been made. In the introduction to the final portfolio, students were asked to comment on their approach to revising errors, their use of the source text, and the perceived benefits of writing a portfolio. Twelve students reported to have used their first-year Spanish book instead of a dictionary or a grammar book as a reference because the explanations were clear and concise. Eight students mentioned the difficulty of writing their own sentences using a source text . These students had a tendency to copy sentences literally from the source text, sometimes using fragments that did not convey complete ideas. These problems were not encountered in the compositions because tasks were designed to create a new text using the source instead of demonstrating reading comprehension. Regarding the benefits of writing a portfolio, nine participants admitted they had waited until the deadline to make corrections for all the entries, which resulted in a progressive decline of successful corrections.
In-Class Activities
Participants in Group A received a prewriting worksheet that required them to write an outline of their composition and a list of words (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs, etc.) that they anticipated useful for the topic. Students were encouraged to compare their lists with their classmates and share information. The worksheets were evaluated for completion, and students were allowed to use them while writing their compositions as long as they had not written complete sentences on them.
Participants in Group B received a prewriting worksheet to be completed at home. They were instructed to organize ideas and vocabulary according to semantic categories. During the next meeting, students worked in groups and explained their choices to each other. Students who had not completed the tasks in advance did not sit with a group and finished the worksheet by themselves. By the end of class, each group presented its ideas and explained its choices, and the instructor answered questions about vocabulary and how to approach specific tasks (description, narration, comparisons, etc.). Participants were expected to note ideas during the discussion sessions. The last worksheet contained specific structures that were considered useful to the students according on the task (e.g., list advantages or disadvantages of tourism, list the positive and negative impacts of technology on every day life, list the characteristics of realist vs. surrealist art.)
Writing Assignments
E1: Source text: You have mail, Tienes un e-mail (Kiddle, et al., 2002: pp. 129-131). Argue if modern technology has more disadvantages or advantages, mention things you like and dislike about technology, and write a comparison of technology now and technology 50 years ago.
E 4: Source text: Thief of Minds, Ladrón de la mente (Muñoz, 2000a). Write an essay from the point of view of one of the characters (three choices).
E 1: Rain forests: The earth’s lungs should not die, Selvas tropicales: los pulmones del planeta no deben morir, (Kiddle, et al., 2002: pp. 23-26). Write an essay on a ecological problem, its causes, consequences, and possible solutions.
E 4: (1) Dangers of tongue piercing, El peligro de los piercings en la lengua (Saludmanía, 1998). Agree or disagree with a friend who wants to get piercings. Give advise on how to take care of it and how to deal with friends and family members who disapprove; (2) The Use of Animals in Scientific Experiments El uso de animales en los experimentos científicos, (Kiddle: p. 116). Argue in favor of or against the use of animals for food, medical research, defense, and so forth; or (3) TV Addiction, La teleadicción, (Kiddle: pp. 243-245). Argue that addiction to TV-watching is similar to or different from addiction to alcohol, tobacco, or other drugs.
Data collection and analysis
For group A, errors were identified according to an adaptation of Lalande’s (1982) ECCO (p. 148), and subsequently students had to record their mistakes on an error frequency chart also adapted from Lalande’s EASE (p.149). Errors for Group B were marked electronically using a code adapted from Ferris and Roberts (2001: p. 169) and students were instructed in the use of the editing tools in Microsoft Word in order to make corrections.
The results in Table 1 show errors made by group
and by category in the first draft of Essay 4. Although participants
successfully used new words from the source texts, the largest percentage of
mistakes fall in the lexical category in both groups. Group A made a higher
number of errors, but the average number of words for that group was 272
compared to Group B, which averaged 204 words. Although students in Group B
made more mistakes in noun endings, many of them were agreement errors. Since
grammatical gender and number are not salient features in Spanish, students
tend to ignore them even when the gender assignment is semantic (e.g., mujer ‘woman,’
regardless of the ending, is a feminine noun) and not morphologically
determined (e.g., artista refers to
either a male or a female artist). Group A presented a higher mean of errors in
sentence structure, and the majority of
these mistakes were omitted prepositions and indirect object pronouns.
Table 1: Errors Essay 4, Draft 1—means/s.d.
|
|
V |
N |
A |
L |
SS |
Total |
|
|
Group A (n =16) |
mean s.d. % |
8.8 2.9 (19.4) |
5.9 3.9 (13) |
4.0 2.4 (8.8) |
16.8 7.5 (36.9) |
9.9 7.2 (21.7) |
46 17 |
|
Group B (n = 19) |
mean s.d. % |
4.1 3.4 (17.42) |
7.2 3.9 (26.49) |
2.3 2.5 (10) |
9.9 5.9 (39.14) |
1.6 1.5 (6.9) |
25 12 |
Note: V = all verb errors; N = errors in nouns, gender
and number agreement, possessives; A = articles, demonstratives, adjectives,
missing or used incorrectly; L = lexical errors, word choice, errors in pronouns
and prepositions; SS = sentence structure, word order, omitted or unnecessary
words.
Table 2 shows errors in the final version of
Essay 4 after corrections. Students in Group A greatly reduce the mean of total
errors after receiving feedback. Participants in this group, and those in Group
B to a lesser extent, had difficulties correcting mistakes in the verb
category. Participants in Group A corrected only 56% of them. The two areas
that presented more problems were aspect (preterit vs. imperfect) and tense
(present vs. past and future vs. conditional). Although students in Group A had
a more detailed correction code, the mean of errors in the verb section is
higher than that of Group B. The verb category, for example, has been condensed in these tables for the
sake of comparison, but students in Group A received a more direct indication
of the type of mistake they had made: VT = verb tense; VA = verb aspect; VM =
verb mood; S-V = subject-verb agreement; VF = verb form. While students in
Group B received the same marking for all verb errors (V = all errors in
verbs), they were able to correct 71% of the mistakes.
Table 2: Errors Essay 4, Final Version—means/s.d.
|
|
V |
N |
A |
L |
SS |
Total |
|
|
5.0 2.9 (27.1) |
1.5 1.5 (8.0) |
0.93 1.0 (5.0) |
7.0 4.2 (37.9) |
4.0 2.9 (21.8) |
18.6 2.9 |
||
|
Group B (n = 19)
|
mean s.d. % |
2.4 2.4 (21.2) |
2.4 2.7 (20.7) |
1.4 1.7 (11.6) |
4.2 3.2 (36.3) |
1.1 1.4 (10.1) |
2.4 7.9 |
Table 3: Correctly
Identified Errors
|
|
V |
N |
A |
L |
SS |
Total |
|
|
Group A (n =16) |
% |
56.3 |
85.26 |
96.92 |
63.33 |
67.3 |
68.6 |
|
Group B (n = 19) |
% |
71.38 |
78.38 |
64.29 |
78.05 |
72.41 |
75.1 |
1. What effect do different
modalities of error correction have
on students’ self-editing abilities?
2. What is the effect of awareness of the processes
of reading and writing on quality of writing?
With regard to Research Question 1 there was substantial evidence that students in Group B, those who worked with a shorter code (five items), were more successful at correcting errors. Also the electronic modality allowed them to move within the text from error to error automatically, and it was easier to find corrections. Students in Group A used a 16-item correction code that was deemed rather cumbersome, and it seems the additional information carried on the code (i.e., what kind of error in the verb: tense, aspect, mood, etc.) was in some cases misinterpreted by students. Also, students who worked with hard copies had a harder time transferring the corrections to the computer. Several students in Group A (31%) indicated that they retyped the essays every time they had to make corrections an act that resulted in new mistakes, and in a few cases students opted to eliminate sentences rather than trying to fix them. The findings are consistent with Ferris and Roberts (2001) in regard to the treatment of lexical and sentence structure errors. Students in Group A were able to identify correctly 63.3% of lexical errors and 67% of sentence structure errors, while students in Group B correctly identified 78% of lexical and 72% of sentence structure errors. Students in both groups showed concerns about grammatical accuracy in writing and expected to have their errors marked. Students in Group A mentioned that the lack of grammar correction in their journal entries was as frustrating as the number of errors they had to correct in their essays.
While the debate regarding effectiveness of feedback continues, it is possible that students are motivated by the error –correction and that the effects will become evident over time (Ferris, 2004). The results also reveal that students show improvement from first draft to final version of the same essay and little improvement between first drafts of first and last essays; thus it is possible that feedback in this case has not had a long-lasting effect on writing. Nonetheless, students in both groups demonstrated an increased ability to successfully identify errors. As Casanave (2004) indicates, it is important that instructors define improvement for students and help them understand that the feedback is aimed at specific areas of improvement. The perceptions of students in Group A regarding the importance of grammar accuracy were reinforced by the correction code that emphasized what students did wrong. This outcome was not intended by the researcher and was partially rectified in the treatment of Group B.
Research Question 2 looks at the effects of awareness of reading and writing processes. Although both groups engaged in prewriting activities, the quality of their essays differed in content, organization, and completion. Students in Group A had brainstorming and planning sessions the objectives of which were to elicit useful vocabulary and to organize content. Nevertheless, they had trouble staying on task and often changed the function of the essay to one that seemed more comfortable for their proficiency level (i.e., description instead of narration, exposition instead of argumentation). Group B worked with brainstorming and planning as well, but the focus of the planning sessions was ideas and semantic grouping of vocabulary and concepts. This group also worked on discussing effective ways to describe, narrate, compare, and hypothesize, and the attention was drawn away from grammatical accuracy. Students who understood writing as a process and spent more time revising and editing were more successful at correctly identifying their errors. The use of electronic feedback coincides with Casanave’s observation that the instructor’s role can resemble the work of a professional editor more than that of a teacher, giving students a chance to reflect on their own meanings rather than adjusting to what the teacher thinks they mean ( p.95). The results of this study suggest that instructors need to find appropriate means to help students depart from translation to develop both proficiency and accuracy.
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EECO/EASE |
Essay1/rewrite |
Essay 2/rewrite |
|
Verbs (S-V agreement) Aspect (A) Mood (M) Auxiliary verbs (Aux) Form (VF) Gender (G) Number (N) Form (F) Article (agreement/form) Lexical error (L) Pronoun (omitted/incorrect) Preposition (Pre) Word order (WO) Idiomatic Expression (EX) Spelling (Sp) Total |
|
|
Short Code (Ferris)
V all verb errors, tense, mood, aspect, s-v agreement
N noun-endings, gender and number
A articles or other determiners, incorrectly used or omitted
L lexical errors, nouns, pronouns and prepositions
ES sentence structure, word order, idiomatic expressions, unnecessary words
|
|
Least important (%) |
Somewhat important (%) |
Most important (%) |
N/A (%) |
|
5.7 |
11.4 |
80 |
2.8 |
|
|
Writing |
20 |
22.8 |
42.8 |
11.4 |
Listening
|
2.8 |
25.7 |
68.5 |
2.8 |
|
Comprehension |
28.5 |
22.8 |
28.5 |
2.1 |
|
Speaking |
2.8 |
11.4 |
82.8 |
2.8 |
Grammar
|
5.7 |
34.2 |
51.4 |
8.5 |
Appendix C: Writing and Reading perceptions (N= 35)
|
|
Group A (n = 16) |
Group B (n = 19) |
|
|
1. Do you like to write? |
(%) |
(%) |
|
|
|
yes |
68.8 |
68.4 |
|
|
no |
31.3 |
26.3 |
|
2. Do you consider yourself a good writer? |
|||
|
|
yes |
31.3 |
57.9 |
|
|
no |
68.6 |
42.1 |
|
3. What is your primary concern when writing? |
|||
|
|
vocabulary and grammar |
56.3 |
57.9 |
|
|
organization and content |
12.5 |
10.5 |
|
|
meaning |
31.3 |
31.6 |
|
4. How do you approach writing in a foreign language? |
|||
|
|
start in English and translate |
75 |
47.4 |
|
|
start in Spanish and avoid translation |
25 |
52.6 |
|
5. How do you approach composition corrections? |
|
|
|
|
|
consult rules |
25 |
42.1 |
|
|
intuition |
75 |
57.9 |
|
6. Do you like to read? |
|||
|
|
yes |
75 |
63.2 |
|
|
no |
25 |
36.8 |
|
7. What do you do when you do not know the meaning of a word? |
|||
|
|
consult a dictionary |
56.3 |
47.4 |
|
|
ignore it |
25 |
36.8 |
|
|
try to deduce meaning from context |
18.8 |
15.8 |