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| ScriptLog - Analysis of
text production |
Users
Maarit Mutta
 
| Keywords: |
adult second language learners, cognitive processes in writing, on-line research, pause behaviour
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| Description: |
Fluency in Second-Language vis-à-vis Mother-Tongue Writing Processes
My doctoral dissertation deals with the fluency of writing processes in Second Language compared with the fluency of writing processes in the mother tongue. The corpus consisted of texts written in French by eleven Finnish university students of French (L2) and six native speakers of French (L1) from different study fields. Both groups participated in a test that mainly consisted of two parts: a) an essay (between c. 150-200 words) written on ScriptLog, which is a tool for experimental research on the on-line process of writing, and b) an oral stimulated recall type verbal protocol where students verbalise in their mother tongue sequences of thought relevant to their task.
The results give support to earlier research findings that L2 writers more often make longer pauses in every location throughout the process than writers in their L1. Nevertheless, there was also a difference between the mother tongues, Finnish and French: the Finns made longer pauses, but the French had more difficulties with lower-level cognitive activities (e.g. orthography) and therefore paused more often within a word.
The results indicated statistical differences between the groups in pausal behavior, but there also was a lot of individual variation. We could moreover measure a personal pause length for every writer by means of the Hidden Markov Model.
Finally, the different writing profiles did not predict the level of success in the final result (i.e. product). The results showed moreover that at the processing level writing approaches speaking, even if the result is quite different.
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