11 September - 17 September: Critical examination of L2 writing process research

Key Points: This text is a reflection on many other studies concerning L2 writing. Instead of conducting tests to gather data like Sasaki did in the other reading above, these researchers gathered their data by looking at other research projects. There aim was to determine how effective L2 research has been up until this point. And, their conclusion is that L2 language researchers have a lot of work ahead of them.

This reading did a very good job of detailing all the ways that previous research projects have attempted to extract data from L2 writers. However, the authors also did a good job of explaining how each method has its flaws. For example, Sasaki had test subjects watch themselves writing on video and they recalled what they were thinking while they wrote. The authors in this study bring up the point that the test subjects can not be 100% accurate as the recall their own thoughts. Given the situation, the test subjects may be idealizing what they were thinking in order to comply with what they feel is the proper way to think while writing.

The article continues on to question many methods of gathering data in L2 language research. One method that interested me was the dual-task test. This is where researchers distract writers with unrelated input, such as a series of random numbers, while the test subjects write. This sounded quite strange to me until later it was explained that this method was used to determine the amount of cognitive resources test subjects needed while writing. The random input would use up brain power and if brain power was necessary for writing than the writing would be affected. If test subjects were not distracted than that meant that they were not using all of their cognitive resources to write.

My interaction with the article: This reading was very difficult to understand at times. The more difficult it was to understand the more I realized that conducting this type of research is not easy. I felt good about myself when the authors raised some of the doubts that I had while I was reading about Sasaki's research. My doubts just scratched the surface, though. These authors took so many factors into consideration as they criticized the research techniques that I felt bad for the researchers in the previous studies. I wonder if this criticism made any researchers angry.

In my classroom I could take some of what I learned about the complexities of writing in L2. But, this article has left me with some unanswered questions. I don't know if I'm confident enough to take anything I 've read about in this article into the classroom.

One that I'm particularly curious about is what language are the L2 writers thinking in? Perhaps this question was answered in one of the sections in the article that I had trouble understanding. I wondered if it would help L2 writers to write their first draft in L1 and then translate that the best they could. This may seem like a silly question, but I've never written in L2.

I also wonder what differences can be found between typing and writing be hand. As far as I could tell, this article didn't address that.