Learning-To-Write and Writing-To-Learn in an Additional Language

Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

Language Learning & Language Teaching (LL<) The LL< monograph series publishes monographs, edited volumes and text books on applied and methodological issues in the field of language pedagogy. The focus of the series is on subjects such as classroom discourse and interaction; language diversity in educational settings; bilingual education; language testing and language assessment; teaching methods and teaching performance; learning trajectories in second language acquisition; and written language learning in educational settings. For an overview of all books published in this series, please see http://benjamins.com/catalog/lllt

Editors Nina Spada

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto

Nelleke Van Deusen-Scholl Center for Language Study Yale University

Volume 31 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language Edited by Rosa M. Manchón

Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language Edited by

Rosa M. Manchón University of Murcia

John Benjamins Publishing Company Amsterdamâ•›/â•›Philadelphia

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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences – Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1984.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Learning-to-write and writing-to-learn in an additional language / edited by Rosa M. Manchón. p. cm. (Language Learning & Language Teaching, issn 1569-9471 ; v. 31) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Second language acquisition. 2. Language and languages--Study and teaching. I. Manchón, Rosa. P118.2.L38â•…â•… 2011 418.0071--dc23 isbn 978 90 272 1303 7 (Hb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 1304 4 (Pb ; alk. paper) isbn 978 90 272 8483 9 (Eb)

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© 2011 – John Benjamins B.V. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint, microfilm, or any other means, without written permission from the publisher. John Benjamins Publishing Co. · P.O. Box 36224 · 1020 me Amsterdam · The Netherlands John Benjamins North America · P.O. Box 27519 · Philadelphia pa 19118-0519 · usa





To Mia Victori, In Memoriam

Table of contents

Preface Alister Cumming

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Introduction chapter 1 Situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions  of L2 writing Rosa M. Manchón

3

Part I.╇ Learning-to-write and writing-to-learn: Mapping the terrain chapter 2 Learning to write: Issues in theory, research, and pedagogy Ken Hyland

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chapter 3 Writing to learn in content areas: Research insights Alan Hirvela

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chapter 4 Writing to learn the language: Issues in theory and research Rosa M. Manchón

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Part II.╇ Learning-to-write and writing-to-learn: Research insights chapter 5 Learning to write in a second language: Multilingual graduates  and undergraduates expanding genre repertories Ilona Leki

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viii Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

chapter 6 Writing to learn and learning to write by shuttling between languages Suresh Canagarajah chapter 7 Beyond writing as language learning or content learning:  Construing foreign language writing as meaning-making  Heidi Byrnes chapter 8 The language learning potential of form-focused feedback on writing:  Students’ and teachers’ perceptions Fiona Hyland chapter 9 Writing to learn in FL contexts: Exploring learners’ perceptions  of the language learning potential of L2 writing Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios chapter 10 Exploring the learning potential of writing development  in heritage language education John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

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Conclusion chapter 11 Reflections on the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn  dimensions of second language writing Lourdes Ortega Contributors’ biodata  Authors index Thematic index

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251 255 259

Preface Alister Cumming

University of Toronto

Inquiry into writing in second or foreign languages has always involved – and may even be defined by – dialogues among diverse interests and contrary assumptions. Studies of writing, composition, or rhetoric have tended to assume that a single language (often, English) is constant, but studies of writing in second or foreign languages (L2 writing) complicate this assumption, demonstrating how language and cultural variability and change are increasingly the norms around the world, particularly in academic and work situations. Studies of second language acquisition, in turn, have tended to assume that oral communication is the standard medium to evaluate learners’ language development, but studies of L2 writing complicate this assumption, showing how writing can be a more valued ability (than oral proficiency) in, for example, classroom or academic contexts, or how L2 learners past the age of childhood use literate resources effectively and integrally in ways that are not possible in the early acquisition of a first language. These kinds of contrary dialogues tend to be embraced and enacted by the practicing educators, programs, and curricula that draw eclectically on an array of pedagogical resources, approaches, and concepts to guide the teaching of L2 writing (Leki, Cumming & Silva 2008). Over the past few decades, the extent of activity focused on L2 writing has increased enormously, following from increased international mobility and communications, such that studies of L2 writing have become institutionalized in many educational programs, through scholarly and professional associations and publications, and in the form of certification for teachers and basic requirements for advanced research degrees and scholarly investigations. An inevitable consequence of this increased activity and institutionalization is serious deliberation over key concepts as well as systematic research into their fundamental nature. The present book brings together and evaluates one of these central dialogues about the nature of L2 writing. Contributors address the fundamental and intriguing paradox that L2 writing is not only an ability to acquire, teach, and assess€– as is conventionally assumed – but L2 writing is also a means, context, and basis for

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learning, both of language and of writing. The central dialogue here is between theories, research, and educational practices on second language acquisition and on written composition. But a multiplicity of dialogues about other fundamental issues inevitably arises: What is learning? What is writing? What is language? What is multilingualism? What is identity in social contexts? What are optimal educational practices? How and why should we understand and distinguish all of these issues as well as their interactions? An aspect of this dialogue that has personally intrigued me are certain thinking processes that are evident, particularly through think-aloud protocols, as people write in a second language. As I observed in Cumming (1990), and as Murphy and Roca de Larios (2010) have investigated more recently in greater depth, when composing earnestly in a second language people exert remarkable mental effort to search for the best words, ensure the accuracy of their language and rhetoric, and to overcome knowledge lacks. As they do, writers use an array of resources in their first and second languages, analyze their explicit knowledge about writing and grammar, and constantly evaluate and adjust their situational intentions. These cognitive activities are surely a strategic means of controlling one’s own text production. Accumulatively over time and experience, they must also represent complex and emergent ways of creating, consolidating, evaluating, making automatic, restructuring, and extending one’s knowledge about language as well as one’s writing abilities (cf. Ellis & Larsen-Freeman 2009). These self-control or inner-speech dimensions become evident through think-aloud protocols, but they are prompted by the nature of writing itself, which sets a context for language production at a self-controlled pace, in relation to a fixed text that demands evaluation and so editing, and with a premium on effective and accurate communication to suit specific purposes. These cognitive processes must happen during oral communications as well, though perhaps with less time, deliberation, or opportunities. Moreover, as my colleague Merrill Swain and others (e.g., Swain & Lapkin 1995) have demonstrated, peer collaborations while writing or performing other language tasks are also optimal contexts to elicit and scaffold these potentials for learning inter-subjectively – forming a kind of paradigm for organizing second language and literacy learning. A crucial point that the present book makes evident is the extent to which this paradigm necessarily extends along numerous, interacting dimensions. Language, literacy, and learning have to be recognized to function at multiple levels, ranging from micro-levels of words, orthographies, punctuation, morphology, syntax, and ideas to macro-levels of register, rhetoric, positioning oneself in discourse communities, establishing identities, acculturation, and social action. Chapters in the present book take up and extend this dialogue of multiplicity through an exemplary blend of theories, research, and analyses of practices in education and



Preface

written literacy. Rosa Manchón has marshaled together leading scholars from around the world to review key concepts and to present results from new research on L2 writing and learning from these perspectives. Lourdes Ortega’s concluding chapter, in turn, neatly points out why these matters warrant serious attention as well as clarification: Misalignments can occur because students, teachers, researchers, or institutional programs may have differing purposes related to L2 writing, but these divergences can be reconciled through synergies between the complementary purposes for writing, language learning, and teaching exemplified in the book. The opening chapter by Rosa Manchón and the closing chapter by Lourdes Ortega already summarize, eloquently and insightfully, the book’s contents, but I feel obliged to offer impressions of those aspects of individual chapters that most captured my attention. Ken Hyland is particularly cogent and comprehensive in reviewing major trends about “learning to write”, while nudging genre theory a few steps further forward. Alan Hirvela’s chapter provides a neat counterpoint to Hyland’s, recounting how an alternative strand of interests in “writing to learn” surfaced several decades ago, proliferated, and has subtly transformed how educators and researchers need to think. Rosa Manchón’s review chapter concludes the first half of the book by analyzing these issues in depth, showing how they connect to, align with, and enrich theories about learning languages, proposing benefits for writing and collaboration that have been neglected by the predominant focus on studies of individuals’ oral communications. The second half of the volume presents a range of empirical studies, each using innovative research approaches that produce notable findings. This is where the larger dialogue about “writing to learn” and “learning to write” particularly jells. Ilona Leki’s study convinced me to teach from what students know, which she shows can be substantially more than is usually presumed. Suresh Canagarajah’s chapter expanded my thinking about multilingual writing in multiple and subtle ways. Heidi Byrnes reminded me how rhetorically complex summary writing really is, and also how comprehensive a theory systemic-functional linguistics is. Fiona Hyland’s research convinced me, once again, that language learning and writing have to be conceptualized more broadly and deeply than simply as teachers’ feedback on students’ performances. The study by Rosa Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios affirmed that learning occurs in diverse, intricate, and often unacknowledged ways while writing in an additional language. John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz made it clear that curricular decisions need to account decisively for the complexity of students’ backgrounds, abilities, and aspirations because these can vary on fundamental bases even for a single language taught in a single institution.

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One could simply consider these multiple dialogues as integral lessons for senior students who are aspiring researchers. But the conversations, complexities, and issues that they open up go well beyond academic issues or any single language or educational situation. They establish the groundwork and rationales to prepare new investigations into and to form new perspectives on the relationships between writing, language, and learning in diverse contexts and among varied populations around the world. These dialogues need to and surely will continue, extending rather than confining the multiple boundaries of language and literacy learning, teaching, and development.

References Cumming, A. 1990. Metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. Written Communication 7: 482–511. Ellis, N. & Larsen-Freeman, D. (eds). 2009. Language as a Complex Adaptive System, Supplement 1 to Language Learning 59. Leki, I., Cumming, A. & Silva, T. 2008. A Synthesis of Research on Second Language Writing in English. New York NY: Routledge. Murphy, E. & Roca de Larios, J. 2010. Searching for words: One strategic use of the mother tongue by advanced Spanish EFL learners. Journal of Second Language Writing 19: 61–81. Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. 1995. Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step toward second language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391.

Introduction

chapter 1

Situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing Rosa M. Manchón

University of Murcia, Spain

This introductory chapter to the book serves to set the scene for both the three strands of research reviewed in Part I (learning to write, writing to learn content, and writing to learn language), and for the empirical studies contained in Part II. It does so by situating the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn perspectives explored in the book in second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA) scholarship. The aims of the book are accounted for against this background, emphasizing the way in which the collections helps to expand the L2 writing and SLA research agendas. This is complemented with an overview of the structure of the book and of the different chapters in it.

The ultimate aim of the present collection is to advance our understanding of written language learning in an additional language (L2) by exploring together two general dimensions of L2 writing: on the one hand, the manner in which second and foreign (L2) users learn to express themselves in writing (the learning-to-write dimension, LW), and, on the other, the way in which the engagement with L2 writing tasks and activities can contribute to development in areas other than writing itself (the writing-to-learn dimension), be it content knowledge (learning-to-write content, WLC), or language knowledge and skills (writing-tolearn language, WLL). These three perspectives (LW, WLC, and WLL) traverse L2 writing scholarship and practice, although they have developed almost independently from each other, have been informed by different theoretical frameworks, and have resulted in different pedagogical procedures. As we learn in Chapters 2 and 3, the LW and some WLC perspectives (especially Writing Across the Curriculum, WAC) belong to the domain of mainstream L2 writing research, they have investigated primarily second language (SL) writers, have been informed by L1 composition, English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes research, and



Rosa M. Manchón

are associated (especially in North America) with composition classes and WAC programmes. At the level of pedagogy, they have materialized, for instance, in process-oriented and genre approaches to the teaching of writing, in the case of LW. In contrast, as detailed in Chapters 3 and 4, other WLC approaches (i.e. Content-based Instruction) and the WLL perspective belong to the realm of second language acquisition (SLA) studies, have investigated both SL and foreign language (FL) writers, has been framed in cognitive and sociocultural theories of SLA, and they are associated with SL and FL classrooms and with pedagogical procedures informed by, for instance, CLIL (Content and Language Integrated Learning) and TBLT (Task-based Language Teaching). Given this disciplinary compartmentalization, the present book is based on the recognition of the theoretical and pedagogical relevance of jointly exploring these various learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of writing for the development of a comprehensive theory of L2 writing. Such a comprehensive theory must ultimately be able to explain the multifaceted nature of L2 writing, which is closely linked to the key elements emphasized in each of the three perspectives that inform the contributions to the book: writing itself and written texts in LW, readers and contexts of use in WLC, and language in WLL, an issue more fully developed by Lourdes Ortega in Chapter 12. A comprehensive theory of L2 writing must also account for the distinctiveness of the various purposes (personal, professional, and/or educational) that characterize L2 writing in the myriad of contexts in which L2 writing is learned and taught. In this respect, it is important to acknowledge that these various purposes are not solely associated with the LW dimension of L2 writing and, what is more, that learning and teaching L2 writing may entail the co-existence of aims related to writing itself (LW), to learning disciplinary subject-matter in the content areas (WLC), and/or to engaging in writing as a tool for language learning (WLL). In fact, this interaction of purposes is one of the most distinctive messages that stem from the research reported in the empirical studies included in Part II of the book. The dual exploration of the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of writing in an additional language undertaken in this edited collection is also intended as an expansion of the L2 writing and SLA research agendas. Regarding the former, a cursory reading of the research on writing in an additional language shows that L2 writing theory and pedagogical thinking have traditionally been explicitly or implicitly equated with the inquiry into the intricacies of the LW process, primarily in SL contexts. This is understandable if we also bear in mind that L2 writing scholarship emerged as a “second language” phenomenon and, more precisely, as a North American phenomenon (see K. Hyland and Hirvela this volume). Despite the efforts of many scholars to widen the focus of



Chapter 1.╇ Situating learning-to-write and writing-to-learn

the research and to go beyond the “political borders of North America” (Silva, Leki & Carson 1997:â•›424), L2 writing has remained very much as a synonym of learning and teaching to write in university settings in English-dominant countries (but see Leki, Cumming & Silva 2008 for a review of research on other populations apart from college-level L2 writers). As noted by Leki, Cumming and Silva (2008), “the L2 writing profession has increasingly acknowledged that it is counterproductive to analyze English learners’ writing or language development without embedding the inquiry in the human, material, institutional, and political contexts where they occur” (Leki et al. 2008:â•›9).The book was also motivated by the belief that this socially-situated approach to the investigation of L2 writing (see also Ortega & Carson 2010) entails taking future L2 writing research along new or partially explored avenues, as done in some of the chapters that follow. To start with, the WLL dimension deserves a more prominent place in the L2 research agenda. As noted in the introduction to an edited collection on FL writing (Manchón 2009), some FL learners might feel the need or the imperative to learn to write for professional or academic reasons, while others may experience writing simply as a language learning vehicle, hence Leki (2009:â•›xv)’s admonition that “Contrary to dogma in SL writing, with its nowtraditional de-emphasis of language learning, using writing to develop language proficiency may be a central aim of L2 writing in FL settings.” What we learn in the book is that this is equally relevant in SL contexts. These considerations explain why L2 writing research, in addition to exploring how L2 writers learn to write, also has to make room for the investigation of the way in which writing might affect language learning outcomes, a claim originally made by Linda Harklau (2002) almost a decade ago. What is more, the configuration of intervening factors becomes even more complex in some educational contexts in which learning-to-write and writing-to-learn are inseparable due to educational and linguistic reasons, for instance, in university FL language degree programmes, as clearly evidenced in the research reported by Byrnes (Chapter 7), and Manchón & Roca de Larios (Chapter 10). The L2 writing research agenda also needs to explore new paths with respect to WLC and LW. As Hirvela (Chapter 3) reminds us, WLC research needs to be extended to the FL context given its almost exclusive focus on SL contexts thus far. In addition, the investigation of the learning-to write and writing-to learn dimensions of L2 writing through a multicompetence lens is another research path worth exploring in the L2 writing scholarship. In this respect, the studies by Leki (Chapter 5) and Canagarajah (Chapter 6) are perfect examples of the type of research that sees “L2 composing as a multicompetent (i.e. biliterate and bilingual) act that is situated and understood in its social context” (Ortega & Carson 2010:â•›52).

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The book also tries to make a case for the relevance of assigning written language learning a more central place in SLA studies. It is therefore not accidental that it is published in a “Language Learning and Language Teaching” book series. Looking into the way in which writing can contribute to advancing language competencies is theoretically relevant due to the secondary role that writing and written language learning have played thus far in SLA theorizing and in the empirical research agenda (see arguments in Adams & Ross-Feldman 2008; Harklau 2002; Williams 2008). In fact, most SLA theories, models, and hypotheses appear to assume, explicitly or implicitly, that SLA results from having access to oral language and from participating in communicative oral exchanges: speaking is what really counts. This assumption may well go back to the early days of the development of the discipline when Hatch (1978) suggested that, in essence, “language learning evolves out of learning how to carry on conversations, out of learning how to communicate” (pag. 63. See Cumming [in press] for further reasons regarding the emphasis on orality in language learning studies). Yet, the printed word plays a major role in the language learning experience of many L2 learners (Harklau 2002; Williams 2008), particularly foreign language (FL) students (Bruton 2007; Manchón 2009, in press a, b; Manchón & Roca de Larios 2007) and adult learners, for whom “second language acquisition may be triggered more through literacy activities than through interaction” (Weissberg 2008:â•›35). These observations justify the theoretical and practical relevance of exploring the language learning opportunities afforded by reading and writing across educational contexts and learner populations, as done in Chapters 7, 8 and 9 with respect to WLL. In this way, the book constitutes a further step in the exploration of L2 writing-SLA interfaces, which, as recently noted by Ortega and Carson (2010), entails providing principled answers to both “the fundamental question of how linguistic expertise in the L2 may constrain the development of L2 composing abilities and, conversely, the less pondered question of how L2 writing may foster overall second language development” (p. 49).

An overview of the content of the book Based on the premises and intended aims of the book mentioned in the preceding section, as Editor of the collection, I invited the contributors to use the threefold distinction of LW, WLC and WWL as the heuristics guiding their respective inquiries. The three chapters included in Part I (Learning-to-Write and Writingto-Learn: Mapping the Terrain) are state of the art accounts and they constitute the theoretical perspectives on the LW, WLC and WLL dimensions of writing explored in the rest of the book: Ken Hyland (Chapter 2) provides an overview of



Chapter 1.╇ Situating learning-to-write and writing-to-learn

existing research on the LW dimension, Alan Hirvela (Chapter 3) reviews theory and research on the WLC dimension, and Rosa Manchón (Chapter 4) synthesizes existing empirical research that sheds light on the WLL dimension of L2 writing. Taken together, these three introductory chapters serve to map the terrain regarding the LW, WLC and WLL dimensions of writing by looking back at what has already been discovered, and by analyzing what lies ahead in terms of needed theoretical and methodological refinements, and open research questions. These analyses serve as the background to situate the empirical studies in Part€II (Research Insights) by Ilona Leki (Chapter 5), Suresh Canagarajah (Chapter 6), Heidi Byrnes (Chapter 7), Fiona Hyland (Chapter 8), Rosa Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios (Chapter 9), and Natalie Lefkowitz and John Hedgcock (Chapter€10). Collectively, these empirical investigations constitute worthy attempts to advance along some of the research avenues suggested in the three chapters in Part I. In addition, the body of knowledge reported in Part II chapters represents a wide range of contexts, writers, and languages: these studies illustrate how L2 writing (in several languages – English, German, and Spanish) is learned (by second and foreign language learners with a range of native language backgrounds, various L2 proficiency levels and degrees of language/writing expertise), taught, and practiced in diverse geographical (in Asia, America, and Europe), instructional (covering university education and heritage language learning), and professional (academia) contexts. Contributors were invited to state upfront which aspect(s) of the LW, WLC or WLL dimensions of writing their contribution focused on, as well as the angle from which it was explored. I also asked them to look into their data with the aim of ascertaining in what way their respective studies contributed to the ultimate aim of the book of deepening our understanding of the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing, and of the potential interfaces among them. The book finishes with a concluding chapter by Lourdes Ortega (Chapter 11) in which she reflects critically on the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn proposals and insights advanced in the various contributions to the book and offer suggestions for future research.

Part I In Chapter 2, Ken Hyland traces the development of research on learning to write for academic purposes in university settings. He distinguishes various research approaches and analyzes their theoretical underpinnings, and the manner in which they have materialized in pedagogical proposals for the L2 writing classroom. He establishes a broad distinction between theories concerned with

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texts (understood both as object and as discourse), with writers and with readers. K.€Hyland then analyzes what each of these theoretical perspectives offers and neglects and what each means in terms of pedagogy. This comprehensive and authoritative analysis also serves to trace the gradual development of the theory and research on LW from the individual to the social plane, the result being that, as he notes, “modern conceptions of learning to write see writing as a social practice, embedded in the cultural and institutional contexts in which it is produced and the particular uses that are made of it.” K. Hyland finishes his review with some conclusions and implications that can be drawn from existing research. He emphasizes the multifaceted nature of L2 writing and hence the view of LW as involving various kinds of knowledge: Content, system, process, genre, and context knowledge. From a pedagogical angle, he advocates a socially-situated approach to the teaching of LW that entails that teachers of writing need to not only understand their learners, but also become “researchers of the texts our students will need and the contexts in which are likely to need them”, an issue explored in some of the chapters in Part II (see Chapters 6, 7, and 10). Alan Hirvela (Chapter 3) reviews research on the WLC dimension of L2 writing. As in Chapter 2, Hirvela first summarizes major theoretical and pedagogical perspectives that have informed WLC research and pedagogy, distinguishing between L1-based approaches (WAC) and L2-based approaches (content-based instruction). He then analyzes in detail two sets of empirical studies published in the last 15 years with the aim of both ascertaining what can be learned from this body of research regarding the role played by writing in learning disciplinary knowledge, and what lies ahead in terms of open research questions. Hirvela emphasizes the mixed findings that exist, as well as the crucial role played by certain instructional conditions in bringing about positive WLC outcomes, especially the support provided by writing and content subject teachers. His critical review also serves to highlight the partial inadequacies of existing theories to account for the complexities involved in investigating WLC across contexts and learner populations, which is in part due to their lack of recognition of the potential connection among LW, WLC, and WLL purposes for given learners in given contexts. The chapter finishes with suggestions for future research, including areas such as the study of the relationship between computer-based literacy and WLC, and the expansion of research to the FL context, as well as to educational levels beyond the dominant university context, these issues being partially taken up in Chapters 6 and 7. In Chapter 4, Rosa Manchón reviews several SLA-oriented strands of empirical research whose findings are interpreted from the perspective of what she calls “the language learning potential of L2 writing.” She first presents an overview of this body of research in terms of the main theoretical approaches informing



Chapter 1.╇ Situating learning-to-write and writing-to-learn

it (which include both cognitive and sociocultural views of L2 learning), main themes addressed in the various studies reviewed, and research methodology issues. She then synthesizes and critically discusses key findings of this research from the perspective of the light they shed on the relationship between written output practice (including both the act of writing itself and the processing of feedback) and second language development. As in the other two chapters in Part€I, Manchón finishes with suggestions for research. In terms of theoretical refinements, she mentions the need for finer grained analyses of the type of learning that may result from the production of written output. In terms of future research avenues, she makes a case for the benefits that may derive from (i)€expanding the data base so that more studies on individual, challenging writing are conducted (as done in Chapters 7 and 9), (ii) exploring further the learning potential of individual versus collaborative writing, and (iii) opening the future research agenda to new learning dimensions of providing and processing of feedback. In this respect, she emphasizes that, with respect to the WLL dimension of L2 writing, the crucial concern should be “feedback for acquisition” and not so much “feedback for accuracy”, as investigated in Chapter 8.

Part II Part II opens up with Ilona Leki’s contribution (Chapter 5), which is a survey and interview study of a group of FL writers upon arrival at an English medium university in the United States. The ultimate aim of the study is to analyze what LW means for this group of learners from a transfer perspective, hence understanding LW as “the students’ opportunity to use writing to learn (or recognize) just how much of their previous experience and instruction in writing they themselves are willing of able to transfer to, and transform in response to a new setting.” Therefore, the central question explored in the study is the role or prior writing experience and instruction in the literacy development of multilingual writers. Leki’s study attests to the inadequacies of existing theories of literacy development mentioned in Part I chapters, and presents convincing evidence of (i) the need to apply a multilingual lens to the exploration of LW, and of (ii) the interaction between learning-to-write and writing-to-learn purposes, in her case between LW and WLL. The detailed analysis of her data leads her to vindicate the inadequacy of seeing multilingual writers as “novice writers” (the prevailing view in L2 writing research and pedagogy), and to stress the agency that her multilingual writers exercised in selectively transferring knowledge across languages and contexts of use. As she notes, the multilingual writers in her study “had come loaded with previous knowledge and experiences but not as statically transferable fixed

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notions about how to engage their new tasks but rather with enough flexibility to recognize and respond malleably to the new rhetorical situations they encountered.” Another important conclusion from her study is the interaction between the LW and WLL dimensions of L2 writing in the literacy experience of the multilingual writers she investigated. The next two chapters (by Canagarajah and Byrnes) look at the textual output of one single writer and explore the interaction of LW and WLC, although the two studies are informed by different theoretical paradigms and are conducted in rather distinct contexts of writing. Chapter 6 presents Suresh Canagarajah’s analysis of the interaction between LW and LWC based on the premise that “as students learn to write they should also write to learn new dimensions of knowledge”. He understands knowledge “in a broader sense as involving cultural assumptions and ideological values in addition to disciplinary knowledge”, and learning as “exploring, discovering and realizing.” Accordingly, his study considers how multilingual students might learn to write in different genres for different audiences and write to learn different ways of exploring and representing knowledge by shuttling between languages. This research orientation is compatible with Ortega and Carson’s (2010) suggestions for possible research strategies in the investigation of L2 writing as a multicompetent event, one of which is the “systematic study of the same writers as they engage in writing across all their languages” (p. 56). In his investigation of an advanced scholar from Sri Lanka, Canagarajah employs such a systematic approach to analyze the way in which he switches discourses across languages (the vernacular and English) and contexts of use (publishing research articles in both languages in local and foreign publishing contexts). Several theoretical and pedagogical conclusions are drawn from the data. Similar to Leki, Canagarajah also stresses the agency exercised by multilingual writers, in his case strategically deciding and exploring how to convey meaning and vary style and discourses depending on variation in the rhetorical context. This leads him to challenge current assumptions positing that “language doesn’t determine the difference in the texts of multilingual authors. Rather, it is context of audience that motivates the differences in discourse and identity.” The implication for pedagogy is that the teaching of L2 writing also needs to take a multilingual stance and do justice to the resources and strengths of multilingual writers. Finally, the study also attests to the interaction among the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of writing in an additional language, which is his case entails writing to learn how to convey meaning and be rhetorically creative across language and discourses, and learning to write in different genre conventions. The study contributed by Heidy Byrnes (Chapter 7) also serves to expand research along some of the paths suggested in the chapters in Part I, especially



Chapter 1.╇ Situating learning-to-write and writing-to-learn

regarding Hirvela’s plea to extend research on WLC to FL settings, and Manchón’s claim regarding the scarcity of studies on complex, meaning-making composition writing tasks in the research on the WLL dimension of writing. The arguments put forward by Byrnes and the research evidence she presents – German L2 writing in a university setting – further reinforce the idea of the close interaction between the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing evidenced in Leki and Canagarajah’s contributions. Based on the assumption that both dimensions are inseparable for ontological, theoretical, empirical, linguistic, and educational reasons, the central question addressed in her study concerns the way in which language learning and content learning can be linked in the activity of how to write. The answer to this question – which is approached in a single-case study of a curriculum-embedded task of summary writing at the early advanced stage of learning L2 German – is theoretically informed by Systemic Functional Linguistics, and is approached from a curricular, developmental perspective. The analysis of her data leads her to conclude that “learning to write and writing to learn are fundamentally inseparable because educational knowing itself occurs at the intersection of language, learning, and knowledge.” Accordingly, she defends a “language-based theory of knowing and also of learning” in the theory and praxis of literacy development, in general, and L2 writing, in particular. The next two chapters (Chapters 8 and 9) are more centrally focused on the WLL dimension of L2 writing in both SL and FL settings, and on several variables mediating potential learning outcomes, including learner-related factors – especially learner’s beliefs and perceptions, Chapters 8 and 9 – and task-related factors€– Chapter 9. In Chapter 8, Fiona Hyland sheds light on the WLL dimension of L2 writing with a case study investigation of students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the language learning potential of form-focused feedback. This study represents a further piece of the puzzle with its focus on the exploration of the WLL dimension of writing in a WL instructional setting (which is also the case of Chapter 9), and with its focus on questions related to the “feedback for acquisition” research agenda mentioned by Manchón in her review of WLL (Chapter 4). Similar to Leki and Canagarajah, F. Hyland also explores issues related to the way in which L2 writers exercised their agency, in her case with respect to how the students in her research purposefully exploited the feedback they received for WLL aims, operationalized in their study in terms of consciousness-raising, noticing, and further practice processes. She investigated her participants’ “engagement with feedback with the aim of showing how individual students’ beliefs and motivations influenced both the extent and depth of their processing of form-focused feedback and thus enhanced or limited its language learning potential”, a research aim very much in line with recent trends in the study of the processing of feedback (cf.

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Storch and Wigglesworth 2010). Her findings point to the crucial role played by individual differences in making the most of the potential for language learning of form-focused instruction, an issue closely linked to the students’ motivations and beliefs. The writer-insider perspective adopted by F. Hyland also informs Manchón and Roca de Larios’s study (Chapter 9). Like Byrnes, they conducted their research in a university FL setting and they similarly focused on composition writing, hence contributing to filling the gap in research on the connection between composition writing and language development mentioned in Chapter 4. Informed by cognitive accounts of SLA and the problem-solving nature of composition writing, Manchón and Roca de Larios investigated 18 EFL learners’ own perceptions of the WLL dimension of L2 writing, together with the WLL actions their participants reported implementing. They conclude from the analysis of the various data sources that their participants’ changes in task conceptualization towards a more multi-dimensional mental model of writing contributed to expanding the range of goals they pursued in their writing, which included both writing goals and, very importantly, language learning goals. The latter involved stretching “their interlanguage resources in search of the complex language needed to express the more complex ideas they now wanted to convey in their writing.” The problem-solving behaviour the participants engaged in resulted in the implementation of language learning processes mentioned in Chapter 8, particularly practice and noticing processes (while writing and while processing feedback) and associated language learning actions. In line with other chapters in the book, Manchón and Roca de Larios also provide evidence in support of the crucial role played by the students’ own agency in making the most of the learning opportunities afforded by writing. They conclude by referring to the “intricate patterns of interaction” between the LW and WLL dimensions of writing in the context they investigated. In their case, the participants’ perception of the language learning potential of writing was both a motivating factor, and one of the goals they pursued in their writing. A further building block in the joint exploration of the LW and WLL dimensions of writing is offered by Natalie Lefkowitz and John Hedgcock in the final chapter in Part II (Chapter 10). They examined the interaction of LW and WLL in a new instructional setting: one in which Anglophone FL learners of Spanish study alongside Spanish Heritage Language (HL). In contrast to the harmony between LW and WLL present in the contexts investigated by Leki, Canagarajah, Byrnes, F. Hyland and Manchón and Roca de Larios, LW and WLL came into conflict in the setting Lefkowitz and Hedgcock studied. As the authors found,



Chapter 1.╇ Situating learning-to-write and writing-to-learn

their FL and HL students’ attempts to achieve educational and professional goals were guided by different needs: WLL in the case of FL learners and LW in the case of HL learners. Lefkowitz and Hedgcock contrasted instructors’ and students’ experiences, practices, beliefs, and perceptions of the LW and WLL dimensions of L2 writing, again adding issues of motivation and attitudes, as discussed in other chapters in the book. The analysis of their data (interviews with instructors, student surveys, and instructional materials) led them to conclude that the WLL practices are ill-suited to addressing HL students’ cognitive, linguistic or literacy needs, this misalignment between uses and purposes of writing being one of the issues that Ortega analyzes in her concluding chapter.

Conclusion In the conclusion (Chapter 11), Lourdes Ortega reflects on the main themes of the book and suggests further avenues for future research. She first discusses the LW, WLC and WLL dimensions of writing explored in the book with respect to the intellectual and disciplinary influences that characterize them, and the professional and contextual locations for each. She then discusses a recurrent theme in the book, i.e. possible interconnections among the LW, WLC and WLL dimensions of writing, analyzing cases in which the three views “are closely related and can synergistically support instruction as well as enhance research insights”, as well as situations in which they “can become dividing lines that feed into compartmentalized professional or scholarly cultures and create misalignments between teacher and student understandings of the value and roles of L2 writing”. This is complemented with an analysis of the research reflected on and reported in the book in terms of the importance of “authenticity, needs, and writerly selves” in the conceptualizations of LW, WLC, and WLL that inform the various contributions. The chapter closes with questions worth exploring in future research, which include theoretical and pedagogical concerns related to the interaction among the LW, WLC and WLL dimensions of writing, and the expansion of the L2 writing and SLA research agendas. It is hoped that the pioneer joint exploration of the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of writing in an additional language undertaken in the book represents a contribution in terms of opening new research avenues in the L2 writing and SLA research agendas, as well as a further attempt to explore L2 writing-SLA interfaces.

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References Adams, R. & Ross-Feldman, L. 2008. Does writing influence learner attention to form? In The Oral-literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 243–266. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Bruton, A. 2007. Vocabulary learning from dictionary referencing and language feedback in EFL translational writing. Language Teaching Research 11(4): 413–431. Cumming, A. In press. Writing development in second language acquisition. In Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, C. Chapelle (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Harklau, L. 2002. The role of writing in classroom second language acquisition. Journal of Second Language Writing 11: 329–350. Hatch, E. 1978. Second Language Acquisition: A Book of Readings. Rowley MA: Newbury House. Leki, I. 2009. Preface. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. Manchón (ed.), xiii–xvi. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Leki, I., Cumming, A. & Silva, T. 2008. A Synthesis of Research on Second Language Writing in English. New York NY: Routledge. Manchón, R. M. 2009a. Broadening the perspective of L2 writing scholarship: The contribution of research on foreign language writing. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 1–19. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Manchón, R. M. In press a. The language learning potential of writing in foreign language contexts. Lessons from research. In Foreign Language Writing. Research Insights, M. Reichelt & T. Chimasko (eds). West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Manchón, R. M. In press b. Teaching writing. In Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, C. Chapelle (ed.). Oxford: Blackwell. Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language contexts. In The Intercultural Speaker. Using and Acquiring English in Instructed Language Contexts, E.€Alcón & P. Safont (eds), 101–121. Dordrecht: Springer. Ortega, L. & Carson, J. 2010. Multicompetence, social context, and L2 writing research praxis. In Practicing Theory in Second Language Writing, T. Silva & P. K. Matsuda (eds), 48–71. West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Silva, T., Leki, I. & Carson, J. 1997. Broadening the perspective of mainstream composition studies. Some thoughts from the disciplinary margins. Written Communication 14(3): 398–424. Storch, N. & Wigglesworth, G. 2010. Learners’ processing, uptake, and retention of corrective feedback on writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 303–334. Weissberg, R. 2008. Critiquing the Vygotskian approach to L2 literacy. In The Oral-Literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 26–45. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Williams, J. 2008. The speaking-writing connection in second language and academic literacy development. In The Oral-Literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 10–25. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press.

part i

Learning-to-write and writing-to-learn Mapping the terrain

chapter 2

Learning to write Issues in theory, research, and pedagogy Ken Hyland

The University of Hong Kong

This chapter explores the main theories for understanding learning to write in adult contexts, briefly discussing their research underpinnings and showing how they translate into pedagogic practice. Making a broad distinction between theories concerned with texts, with writers and with readers, I will show briefly what each approach offers and neglects and what each means for teachers. The categorisation implies no rigid divisions, and, in fact the approaches respond to, critique, and draw on each other in a variety of ways so that classroom practice often involves a combination of them. I believe, however, this offers a useful way of comparing and evaluating the research each approach has produced and the pedagogic practices they have generated.

Writing is central to our personal experience, professional careers and social identities, yet while we are often evaluated by our control of it, its multifaceted nature constantly evades adequate description. In recent years considerable research attention has been devoted to teaching writing in academic and professional settings where novices encounter very different literacy practices to those they are familiar with from their homes, schools, or workplaces, adding specialised literacies to the basic functional demands of reading and writing in contemporary societies . In this chapter I focus on this area to provide something of a context for what follows in some of the chapters in Part II of the book. My intention is to offer a brief overview of the main theoretical frameworks for understanding writing and how these have been merged and translated into classrooms where students are learning to write. Making a broad distinction between theories concerned with texts, with writers and with readers, I will show what each approach offers and how each has contributed to classroom practices. The first approach I shall analyze concentrates on the writer and the cognitive processes used to create texts, a perspective which views learning to write as empowering students with what is known of expert practices.

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The second approach I will review focuses on the products of writing by examining texts, either as objects where learning to write is the application of rules, and as discourse where learning to write is engaging in communication. Finally, the third approach to be dealt with emphasises the role that readers play in writing, attempting to account for the ways in which writers incorporate a sense of audience into their writing. Each approach responds to, critiques, and draws on each of the others in a variety of ways, but offers a useful way of discussing what we know of learning to write by adults in educational contexts. In the conclusion I suggest some theoretical and pedagogical implications of the research reviewed in the chapter.

Focusing on writers This first approach focuses on the writer and seeks to model what good writers do when they write so that these strategies can be taught to L2 students. There have been numerous incarnations of this perspective as it has gradually evolved over 30 years (Flower & Hayes 1981; Flower 1994; Hayes 1996). All, however, recognise certain basic cognitive processes as central to writing and stress the need to develop students’ abilities to plan, define a rhetorical problem, and propose and evaluate solutions. What has evolved is a model which emphasises a planningwriting-reviewing framework and which sees writing as a “non-linear, exploratory, and generative process whereby writers discover and reformulate their ideas as they attempt to approximate meaning” (Zamel 1983:â•›165). In this view writing is seen as a problem solving activity rather than an act of communication. Process theorists explain writing using the tools and models of cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence, so that the model includes a memory, Central Processing Unit, problem-solving programs, and flow charts (see Pritchard & Honeycutt 2006). Most centrally, planning, drafting, revising, and editing are not seen as occurring in a linear sequence, but are recursive, interactive, and potentially simultaneous while all work can be reviewed, evaluated and revised, even before any text has been produced. At any point the writer may jump backwards or forwards to any of these activities: returning to the library for more data, revising the plan to accommodate new ideas, or rewriting for readability after peer feedback. The research into writing processes has been considerable (see Pritchard & Honeycutt 2006; Silva & Brice 2004; Smagorinsky 2006 for reviews) and process studies have been responsible for extending research techniques beyond experimental methods and text analyses to the qualitative methods of the social sciences. Often methods have sought to dig deeper into writers’ practices and perceptions to describe writing from an emic perspective by taking account of the views of



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

writers and readers themselves. In particular, these studies have made considerable use of writers’ verbal reports while composing (cf. Manchón, Roca de Larios & Murphy 2009; Sasaki 2009; Van Den Bergh & Rijlaarsdam 2001), task observation (Bosher 1998), and retrospective interviews (Nelson & Carson 1998). Some of this research is longitudinal, following a few students over an extended period of their writing development (F. Hyland 1998; Sasaki 2007, 2009) and uses multiple techniques (see, for instance, Schoonen, Snellings, Stevenson & van Gelderen 2009) which may include recall protocols and analyses of several drafts. While this extensive research has helped build a better understanding of what writing is and how it might be learnt, we still do not have a comprehensive idea of how people learn to write. Researchers are now more aware of the complexity of planning and editing, the influence of the task on writing, and the value of examining what writers do when they write, but models are hampered by small-scale, often contradictory studies and the difficulties of accessing unconscious processing. Moreover, many cognitive processes are routine and internalised operations performed without any conscious recognition and therefore difficult to access. Bereiter and Scardamalia (1987) have argued that we need at least two process models to account for the differences in processing complexity of skilled and novice writers, which they call knowledge telling and knowledge transforming models. The first addresses the fact that novice writers plan less than experts, revise less often and less extensively, have limited goals and are mainly concerned with generating content. The latter refers to how skilled writers use the writing task to analyse problems, reflect on the task and set goals to actively rework thoughts to change both their text and ideas. They do not explain, however, how novices make the cognitive transition to a knowledge-transforming model, nor do they spell out what occurs in the intervening stages or whether the process is the same for all€learners. The quantity of the research into the writing process has been enormous and it is difficult to exaggerate the impact it has had on writing pedagogy, particularly in North America. Pedagogically, the emphasis in process writing is learning how to write by writing. In this approach teachers attempt to develop their students’ metacognitive awareness of writing processes, i.e. their ability to reflect on the strategies they use to generate and revise material, and how they should attend to feedback on writing. The teacher’s role is to guide students through the writing process, avoiding an emphasis on form to help them develop strategies for generating, drafting, and refining ideas. This has been dramatically facilitated by the increased availability and affordability of personal computers since the early 1980s. Word processing was not just a new form of typing, but a different way of manipulating texts, making it easier to re-draft, revise and edit. As Bloch (2007:â•›52) observes: ‘The ease with which one could make changes or incorporate new ideas

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made it clear how all of these aspects of the writing process were now integrated’. Process research has also meant that cooperative writing, teacher conferences, problem-based tasks, journal-writing, group discussions, and mixed portfolio assessments are now all commonplace practices in our methodological repertoire (e.g. Casanave 2004; Kroll 2003). Teacher response is potentially one of the most influential aspects of the process as it is the point at which the teacher intervenes most explicitly in it. Not only does this individual attention help motivate writers, but it is also the point at which overt correction and explicit language teaching are most likely to occur (Hyland 2004a). Response is crucial in assisting learners to move through the stages of the writing process and various ways of providing feedback are used, including teacher-student conferences, peer response, audio-taped feedback, and reformulation. However, the role of error correction in process models, and its effectiveness in assisting learners to improve their writing over time, remains controversial (Ferris 2006; Truscott & Hsu 2008). There are, however, some serious reservations about this view of writing. This is largely because it is influenced by cognitive psychology rather than applied linguistics, emphasizing what people think about when they write rather than the language they need to do it. An exclusive emphasis on psychological factors fails to offer any clear perspective on the social nature of writing or of the role of language in effective written communication. The approach is also resolutely asocial in any theoretical sense, regarding the learner almost wholly individualistically and the writing process as an abstract, internal process which leads to discoveries about the self as much as about learning to write (e.g., Kent 1999). In other words, we also need to consider forces outside the individual which help guide the writer to define problems, frame solutions and shape the text. The process of writing is a rich amalgam of elements of which cognition is only one. Moreover, this is a model of learning based on personal freedom, self-expression and learner responsibility, all of which helps to empower learners with the confidence that they are writers and their writing is valued. Encouraging students to make their own meanings and find their own text forms, however, does not provide them with clear guidelines on how to construct the different kinds of texts they have to write. Instructional strategies commonly include explicit teaching in searching prior knowledge, goal setting and other activation techniques, but because language tends to be tacked on to the end of the process as “editing,” rather than the central resources for constructing meanings, students are given no way of seeing how different texts are written for particular purposes and audience. In sum, writer-oriented models help explain the difficulties L2 students sometimes have because of the complexity of the writing task, but they do not yet allow us to predict the relative difficulty of particular tasks or students likely



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

progress given certain kinds of instruction. There is some evidence to show that teaching ‘writing process techniques’ can lead to better writing (e.g. Goldstein & Carr 1996), but the methods are employed in such different ways that it is difficult to see if there is consistency in how instruction is conducted in different contexts (Patthey-Chavez, Matsumura & Valdes 2004). We know now that many factors influence the writing process and there is a recognition among process adherents that students not only need help in how to write, but also in understanding how texts are shaped by topic, audience, purpose and cultural norms (see chapters by Leki, Byrnes, F. Hyland and Manchón & Roca de Larios this volume). Researchers see that the process of learning to write not only involves procedural knowledge but also strategies such as activating schemata, genre awareness, grammar proofing, and responsiveness to a particular audience (Pritchard & Honeycutt 2006) while teachers see that more direction is often required for effective learning. In other words, both theory and pedagogy on learning to write have moved away from the idea of writing as a decontextualised skill to give a greater focus to the role of language and context in the process. It is to these dimensions that I turn€next.

Focusing on texts This second broad category focuses on the tangible, analysable aspects of writing by viewing it as a textual product: an outcome of activity rather than as an activity itself. These theories of writing start with surface forms and have a common interest in the linguistic or rhetorical resources available to writers for producing texts. Text-focused theories reduce the intricacies of human communication to the words on a page or screen, but these theories have taken a variety of forms (see Hyland 2010 for an overview). I will describe two here: those which see texts either as objects or as discourse.

Texts as objects Based on the perspective of structuralism originating with Saussure (2006) and implicit in Chomsky’s (1975) Transformational Grammar, writing is considered to be a system of signs independent of its users intentions. A basic premise is that texts are autonomous objects which can be analysed and described independently of particular contexts, writers, or readers. Texts have a structure, they are orderly arrangements of words, clauses and sentences, and by following grammatical rules writers can encode a full semantic representation of their intended meanings.

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Interest in the formal properties of texts has generated considerable research into the regularities we find in writing. In recent years, for example, computer analyses of large corpora have been used to identify how functions such as stance (Biber 2006), temporal frequency (Kennedy 1987) and negation (Tottie 1991) are commonly expressed in writing. An orientation to formal features of texts has also informed a great deal of research into students’ writing development, seeking to measure writing improvement by counting increases in features such as relative clauses, modality and passives through successive pieces of writing. White (2007), for instance, sought to assess language improvement by measuring increases in the number of morphemes, words and clauses in student essays. Shaw and Liu (1998), on the other hand, looked at features of academic writing such as impersonality, hedging, and formality and discovered ‘a general move from a spoken to a written style’ in essays in a three month EAP presessional course. This kind of research has been valuable in revealing salient features of texts and how learners gain control over them, but learning to write in such circumstances often means little more than learning to demonstrate grammatical accuracy and clear exposition with little awareness of a reader beyond the teacher. Informed by a behavioural, habit-formation theory of learning, the teacher’s role is largely to pass on knowledge to novices and to correct errors rather than show how meanings can be conveyed (Ferris 2006). Guided composition, gap filling and substitution exercises are the main teaching methods and writing is removed from context and the personal experiences of writers and readers because meanings can be encoded in texts and recovered by anyone with the right decoding skills. There can be no conflict of interpretations nor different reader positions because we all see things in the same way. Despite surviving in many style guides, textbooks, and classroom practices, the claim that good writing is context-free, fully explicit and takes nothing for granted, is now largely discredited. It is a view which ignores how texts are a response to particular communicative settings and which disregards what writer’s assume their readers will know, and how they will use the text. The writer’s problem is not just to achieve grammatical accuracy and make everything explicit, but to make it explicit for particular readers, balancing what needs to be said against what can be assumed. As a result, there is no convincing evidence that either syntactic complexity or grammatical accuracy are the best measures of good writing or of learning to write. Many students can construct syntactically accurate sentences and yet are unable to produce appropriate written texts, and an obsessive focus on accuracy may deter them from taking risks which move them beyond their current competence. Simply, students can’t simply learn abstract features to produce successful texts but also need to know how to apply their grammatical knowledge for particular purposes and genres.



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

Texts as discourse A second way of seeing writing as text looks beyond surface structures to see them as discourse – the way we use language to achieve purposes in particular situations. The linguistic patterns of texts point to contexts beyond the page, implying a range of social constraints and choices which operate on writers in a particular setting. The writer has certain goals and intentions, certain relationships to his or her readers, and certain information to convey, and the forms of a text are resources used to accomplish these. Treating texts as discourse means seeing writing as social action and seeing teaching as assisting students to link language forms to social purposes and contexts. There are several approaches to teaching writing as discourse, but genre approaches have been the most productive. Genre is essentially a term for grouping texts together, representing how writers typically use language to respond to recurring situations (Christie & Martin 1997; Swales 2004). It is based on the idea that members of a community usually have little difficulty in recognising similarities in the texts they use frequently and are able to draw on their repeated experiences with such texts to interpret and write them relatively easily. This is, in part, because writing is a practice based on expectations: the reader’s chances of interpreting the writer’s purpose are increased if the writer takes the trouble to anticipate what the reader might be expecting based on previous texts they have read of the same kind. Research into academic (Hyland 2004b, 2009; Swales 2004) and professional (Bhatia 2008) genres has had a massive impact on the ways we see language use and on literacy education around the world, helping to develop a socially informed theory of language and an authoritative pedagogy grounded in research of texts and contexts. Classroom applications are an outcome of communicative approaches to language teaching which emerged in the 1970s, continuing a pedagogic tradition of stressing the role language plays in helping learners achieve particular purposes (Hyland 2004a). They are also closely related to current conceptions of literacy which show that writing (and reading) varies with context and cannot be distilled down to a set of abstract cognitive or technical abilities (e.g. Street 1995). There are a wide variety of practices relevant to and appropriate for particular times, places, and purposes, and these practices are not something that we simply pick up and put down, but are integral to our individual identity, social relationships, and group memberships (see Chapter 6 this volume). While there are various manifestations of genre in literacy education, pedagogies in professional and academic situations draw heavily on Bakhtinian notions of intertextuality and dialogism, on Systemic Functional understandings of text structure (see Chapter 7 this volume) and, more sparingly, on Vygotskian principles of pedagogy (Hyland 2007). With its emphasis on communicative

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purpose and the formal properties of texts, ESP and Functional approaches to genre promise very real benefits for learners as they pull together language, content, and contexts, while offering teachers a means of presenting students with systematic explanations of the ways writing works to communicate and why they are written in the ways they are. It is this explicitness which offers the greatest advantages for learning as it replaces the hit or miss inductive methods of process approaches with what Bernstein (1990:â•›73) calls a “visible pedagogy.” Learning is more effective if teachers are clear about what is being studied, why it is being studied, and what will be expected of students at the end of the course, shifting writing instruction from the implicit and exploratory to a conscious manipulation of language and choice (e.g. Hasan 1996; Hall & Harding 2003). As Macken-Horarik (2002) observes, this gives students ‘something to shoot for’, so empowering both writers and teachers. In this perspective teachers of writing clearly need to be teachers of language, as it is an ability to exercise linguistic choices in the ways they treat and organise their topics for particular readers which helps students to give their ideas authority. A knowledge of grammar, focusing on how students can codify meanings in distinct and recognisable ways, becomes central to learning to write. As a result, teaching methods generally first consider how a text is structured and organised at the level of the whole text in relation to its purpose, audience and message. It then shows how all parts of the text, such as paragraphs and sentences, are structured, organised and coded so as to make the text effective as written communication (Knapp & Watkins 1994). Genre approaches encourage us to look for organisational patterns, reminding us that when we write we follow conventions for organising messages because we want our reader to recognise our purpose. Recent research has described move structures in sections of the research article (Bruce 2008), legal cases (Lung 2008), and textbooks (Shi & Kubota 2007). In addition, this kind of pedagogy focuses on salient features of particular genres, such as if-conditionals in medical texts (Carter-Thomas & Rowley-Jolivet 2008) and shell nouns in student essays (Aktas & Cortes 2008). Every genre thus has features which make it different to other genres. Table 1, for example, shows the results of a comparison of frequencies of selected features in a corpus of 240 research articles and 56 textbooks (Hyland 2008).

Table 1.╇ Selected features in research articles and textbooks (per 1,000 words) Hedges

Self-mention

Citation

Transitions

Research articles

15.1

3.9

6.9

12.8

University textbooks

â•⁄ 8.1

1.6

1.7

24.9



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

The greater use of hedging underlines the need for caution and opening up arguments in research papers compared with the authorized certainties of textbooks while the removal of citation in textbooks shows how statements are presented as facts rather than claims grounded in a research literature. The higher use of selfmention in articles points to the personal stake of writers and their desire to gain credit for claims. Transitions are conjunctions and other linking signals and they are twice common in the textbooks as writers need to make connections far more explicit for readers with less topic knowledge. In Systemic Functional models of genre, learning to write is seen as acquiring the ability to make appropriate linguistic choices, both within and beyond the sentence, and teachers can assist this by providing students with an explicit functionally-oriented grammar and models of effective texts (see Chapter 7 by Byrnes). Strategies such as modelling and teacher-learner joint construction of texts are common and many teachers follow the ‘teaching-learning cycle’ (Feez 2001) which draws on Vygotsky’s notion of a scaffolding to support the learner through linked stages of contextualisation, analysis, discussion and joint negotiation of texts. ESP has tended to adopt a more eclectic set of pedagogies, united by a commitment to needs analysis, contextual analysis and move descriptions. Johns (1997), for instance, recommends mixed-genre portfolios to add a reflective dimension to assessment and teaching by requiring students to write texts in a range of genres, collect them together in a folder and then to write a reflection on the texts and on what they learnt. Other methodologies include an emphasis on cooperative pedagogies (Dudley-Evans & St John 1998), the use of corpora to teach the structure of key genres (Haffner & Candlin 2007), and a focus on rhetorical consciousness-raising through student analyses of texts, encouraging students to notice, reflect on, and then use genre conventions to help them produce well-formed and appropriate texts (Swales & Feak 2004). Genre approaches have not been uncritically adopted in L2 writing classrooms, however. Proponents of the “New Rhetoric” approach to genre (e.g. Dias & Pare 2000), for example, argue that writing is always part of the goals and occasions that bring it about, and it cannot be learnt in the inauthentic context of the classroom. Such a view, however, ignores the fact that L2 writers are often at a considerable disadvantage in such unfamiliar naturalistic settings and that genre-based writing teaching can short-cut the long processes of situated acquisition. Critical theorists have also attacked genre teaching, both for accommodating learners to existing modes of practice and to the values and ideologies of the dominant culture that valued genres embody (e.g. Benesch 2009). Genre proponents, however, contend that this argument can be levelled at almost all teaching approaches and that learning about genres actually provides a necessary basis for critical engagement with cultural and textual practices.

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Finally, genre teachers have had to defend themselves against process adherents and the charge that genre instruction inhibits writers’ self expression and straightjackets creativity through conformity and prescriptivism. Obviously the dangers of a static, decontextualized pedagogy are very real if teachers fail to acknowledge variation and apply what Freedman (1994:â•›46) calls “a recipe theory of genre.” But there is nothing inherently prescriptive in a genre approach. There is no reason why providing students with an understanding of discourse should be any more prescriptive than, say, providing them with a description of a clause or even the steps of a writing process. The fact is that genres do have a constraining power, but while selecting a particular genre implies the use of certain patterns, this does not dictate the way we write. It can show the choices that are available to facilitate expression and suggests that by giving students an awareness of regularity and structure teachers can assist learning to write (Hyland 2007). Essentially, genre theories argue that a teacher who understands how texts are typically structured and meanings conventionally expressed are in a better position to intervene successfully in the writing of his or her students, to provide more informed feedback on writing, to make decisions about the teaching methods and materials to use, and to approach current instructional paradigms with a more critical eye.

Focusing on readers This final orientation to learning to write expands the idea of context beyond the local writing situation to the context of use and what writers do to address the reader. This reinforces a communicative dimension to writing where meaning is created via ‘a unique configuration and interaction of what both reader and writer bring to the text’ (Nystrand, Greene & Wiemelt 1993:â•›299). It moves away from our stereotype of an isolated writer hunched over a keyboard to explain composing decisions in terms of the writer’s projection of the interests, understandings, and needs of a potential audience. Therefore, a reader-oriented view of writing emphases the interaction between writers and readers: In this view learning to write involves creating a text that the writer assumes the reader will recognise and expect and the process of reading involves drawing on assumptions about what the writer is trying to do. It is the unfamiliarity of these expectations which makes learning to write in an L2 so difficult because what is seen as logical, humorous, engaging, relevant or well-organised in writing, and what counts as evidence, irony, conciseness, and coherence, are likely to differ across cultures. Questions of audience have encouraged a growing interest in the use of peer and teacher feedback among teachers so that students get an idea of how



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

others understand their texts (e.g. Ferris 2006). Equally, however, teachers recognize that they can promote a sense of readership among students by exposing them to examples of texts in target genres. This is because an understanding of audience largely involves exploiting readers’ abilities to recognise intertextuality between texts. This idea originates in Bakhtin’s (1986) view that language is dialogic: a conversation between writer and reader in an ongoing activity. Writing reflects traces of its social uses because it is linked and aligned with other texts upon which it builds and which it anticipates. Here written genres are regarded as parts of repeated and typified social situations, rather than particular forms, with writers exercising judgment and creativity in responding to similar circumstances. Pedagogically, this has encouraged teachers to employ contexts for writing which reflect real life uses as far as possible, with a clear purpose and a specified external audience. Johns (1997), for example, advocates that students should engage in writing tasks that involve researching potential readers for their written arguments and Storch (2005) shows how collaborative tasks can improve essays by helping writers predict readers’ problems with a text. Of central importance here is to develop an understanding of context as a set of recognisable conventions through which a piece of writing achieves its force. The text is where readers and writers meet. More generally, however, considering readers means looking at the ways writing is used by social groups. Here the writer is neither a creator working through a set of cognitive processes nor an interactant engaging directly with a reader, but a member of a community. The communicating dyad is replaced by the discourses of socially and rhetorically constituted groups of readers and writers. This takes us into the domain of social constructionism and the view that language, and writing, helps constitute our social world and not simply represent it. The ways we think, and the categories and concepts we use to understand the world, are ‘all language constructs generated by knowledge communities and used by them to maintain coherence’ (Bruffee 1986:â•›777). The concept of a discourse community is important here as a way of joining writers, texts and readers together. A text carries certain meanings and gains its communicative force only by displaying the patterns and conventions of the community for which it is written. Discourse communities have been defined in different ways, so that Swales (1990), for instance, sees them as having collective goals, while Johns (1997) suggests they merely have common interests, but they are united in the idea that a text carries certain meanings and gains its communicative force only by displaying the patterns and conventions of the community for which it is written. This approach therefore asks us to accept a certain homogeneity in the practices of social groups which essentially comprise separate cultures with their own particular norms and practices. Within each culture students

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gradually acquire specialized discourse competencies that allow them to participate as group members (see Chapter 6 by Canagarajah). In terms of academic contexts, Wells points out that: Each subject discipline constitutes a way of making sense of human experience that has evolved over generations and each is dependent on its own particular practices: its instrumental procedures, its criteria for judging relevance and validity, and its conventions of acceptable forms of argument. In a word each has developed its own modes of discourse. To work in a discipline, therefore, it is necessary to be able to engage in these practices and, in particular, to participate in the discourses of that community.  (Wells 1992:â•›290)

The concept of discourse community continues to be a problematic idea, however, often laying too much stress on what people share rather than the differences within them. People have different commitments, stakes and statuses in a community and these are not accounted for, nor is it clear how ‘local’ such communities are. The value of the term, however, lies in the fact that it offers a way of bringing writers, readers and texts together into a common rhetorical space, foregrounding the conceptual schema that individuals use to organise their experience and get things done using language (Hyland 2009). The idea has therefore been very influential in researching and teaching writing, showing us how writing works in different disciplines and why, for example, the kinds of essays produced by biology students draw on very different forms of argument, interpersonal conventions and ways of presenting facts and theories than those written by business students. An interest in reader-oriented prose and the target communities which make use of texts reminds us that only when students actually use a language to create genres in specific contexts does their competence in writing cease to be the display of a linguistic code and take on significance as discourse. The role of the writing teacher is therefore to help students discover how valued text forms and practices are socially constructed in response to the common purposes of target communities. Johns (1997) calls this a ‘socioliterate’ approach to teaching: Those who can successfully produce and process texts within certain genres are members of communities, for academic learning does not take place independent of these communities … What I am advocating, then, is an approach in which literacy classes become laboratories for the study of texts, roles, and contexts, for research into evolving student literacies and developing awareness and critique of communities and their textual contracts. (Johns 1997:â•›14–19)

This means that different disciplines value different kinds of argument and set different writing tasks. Research (e.g. Gimenez 2009; Hyland 2004b) suggests that



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

in the social sciences, for instance, synthesising multiple sources is important, while in science, describing procedures, defining objects, and planning solutions are required. In post-graduate programmes, engineers give priority to describing charts, while business studies faculty require students to compare and contrast ideas and take a position. In undergraduate classes, lab reports are common in chemistry, program documentation in computer science, article surveys in maths, and project reports in social sciences. A reader-oriented approach, therefore, suggests that we need to study texts carefully and look for what features are used to engage different readers. Rather than modelling the practices of experts, this approach offers students a guiding framework for producing texts by raising their awareness of the connections between forms, purposes and roles in specific social contexts. Teaching methods vary, but generally seek to give students experience of authentic, purposeful tasks related to the kinds of writing they will need to do in their target communities. This can mean working with subject specialists to produce adjunct or parallel courses to link target literacy and content knowledge more closely, and encouraging students to undertake their own analyses of target texts (Hyland 2006; Swales & Feak 2004). A final consideration here is the relations of power which form part of learning and writing contexts. This highlights the fact that some genres are more dominant and hegemonic within a community and that they carry the values and beliefs of their users, so advantaging those who have access and control of valued genres and disadvantaging others who do not. Writing is both texts and contexts, and learning to write involves developing an awareness of how writing practices are grounded in social (and especially institutional) structures. Critical approaches therefore seek to engage students in the types of activities they are asked to perform in writing classes while encouraging them to question, and perhaps reform, those activities and the conditions they are based on. Of particular interest is the idea of ‘Critical Language Awareness’ as this aims to: empower learners by providing them with a critical analytical framework to help them reflect on their own language experiences and practices and on the language practices of others in the institutions of which they are part and the wider society in which they live. (Clark & Ivanic 1997:â•›217)

Critical approaches thus recognise that there are various literacies, or sets of social communicative practices, in everyday life and emphasise how access to institutionally valued literacies have the power to enhance or reduce peoples’ life chances. A critical approach therefore considers the wider context of culture in which teaching and learning operate: the institutional structures and ideologies which

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intrude into classrooms and with which both students and teachers engage. Fairclough (1995), for example, sees discourse as the link between the immediately local context of situation and the overarching institutional context of culture as it is here where ‘orders of discourse’, or approved institutional practices such as assignments, seminars, essays, and so on, operate to maintain existing relations of power and authority. The practices which operate in education regulate what is worth knowing and who can know it, thus confirming status of those who have knowledge and the position to exercise it. So, by providing students with socially authorized ways of communicating, critical theorists argue that teaching valued genres means promoting the values of powerful social groups by reinforcing particular social roles and relationships between writers and readers. To develop critiques of this kind, students have been encouraged to explore their courses and faculty practices ethnographically by interviewing subject tutors on their course decisions, writing preferences, and beliefs about the discipline (Canagarajah 2002). It may also be possible for students to participate in the negotiation of classroom pedagogies to take greater control of their learning experience (Breen & Littlejohn 2000). Teachers are also encouraged to open dialogues about topics or teaching with students (Benesch 2001) and to establish cooperative classrooms (Cadman 2002). These strategies rely on reconceptualising the roles of teacher, learner and classroom through individual and group activities to gradually manage their own learning. For others, providing learners with greater understanding of and access to valued genres is a crucial aspect of demysitification. Learning about genres, in fact, provides a necessary basis for critical engagement with cultural and textual practices, as Hammond and Macken-Horarik (1999:â•›529) argue: Systematic discussion of language choices in text construction and the development of metalanguage – that is, of functional ways of talking and thinking about language – facilitates critical analysis. It helps students see written texts as constructs that can be discussed in quite precise and explicit ways and that can therefore be analysed, compared, criticised, deconstructed, and reconstructed.

Understanding how texts are socially constructed and ideologically shaped reveals the ways that they represent some interests and perspectives and neglect others. By focusing on the literacy practices writers encounter at school, at work, and at university, genre pedagogies help them to distinguish differences and provide them with a means of understanding their educational experiences. It gives them ways to talk about how language works in particular contexts can therefore assist them with the means of both communicating effectively in writing and of analysing texts critically.



Chapter 2.╇ Learning to write approaches

Conclusion In this overview I have sought to outline some of the major ways by which we understand writing and learning to write and which inform the teaching and learning of writing in university contexts. In doing so I have also tried to question the view that writing is either simply words on a page or an activity of solitary individuals. Rather, modern conceptions of learning to write see writing as a social practice, embedded in the cultural and institutional contexts in which it is produced and the particular uses that are made of it. So while every act of writing is in a sense both personal and individual, it is also interactional and social, expressing a culturally recognised purpose, reflecting a particular kind of relationship and acknowledging an engagement in a given community. The truth is that many theories have been used to study writing and to unpack the complexities of learning to write so that social, cognitive, expressivist, grammatical, and functional views rise, compete, and then often assimilate each other. Each has been dominant somewhere in the world at some time, but teaching is a pragmatic business and these approaches represent available options which can be translated into classroom practices in many different ways and combinations. Together they suggest something of current theory and practice in learning to write and offer a number of key points which are worth bearing in mind when reading some of the chapters in Part II of this book. One point is that learning to write involves five kinds of knowledge: – Content knowledge – the ideas and concepts in the topic area the text will address. – System knowledge – the syntax, lexis, and appropriate formal conventions needed. – Process knowledge – how to prepare and carry out a writing task. – Genre knowledge – communicative purposes of the genre and its value in particular contexts. – Context knowledge – readers’ expectations, cultural preferences and related texts. It is also possible to draw a number of conclusions for teaching from the perspectives presented in this chapter: – Composing is non-linear and goal-driven. Therefore students may benefit from having a range of planning, writing and revising strategies to draw on. – Writing seeks to achieve purposes through genres, or socially recognised ways of using language. Therefore teachers should provide learners with a

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metalanguage for identifying genres and their structures, through analysis of authentic texts and modelling genre stages. – Writing is a purposeful and communicative activity which responds to other people and other texts. Therefore writing tasks should not simply emphasise formal accuracy and discrete aspects of language, but be situated in meaningful contexts with authentic purposes. – Writing is often structured according to the demands and expectations of target discourse communities. Therefore teachers need to provide tasks which encourages students to consider the reader’s perspective by incorporating a range of real and simulated audience sources. – Writing is differently endowed with authority and prestige which sustain inequalities. Therefore instruction should build on students’ own language abilities, backgrounds, and expectations of writing to help them see prestigious discourses as simply other ways of making meanings. Collectively, we might see the research as advising us to reject a single formula for teaching writing and look at what the different models tell us. For teachers of writing this means we need to not only understand our learners, but become researchers of the texts our students will need and the contexts in which are likely to need them.

References Aktas, R. & Cortes, V. 2008. Shell nouns as cohesive devices in published and ESL student writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(1): 3–14. Bakhtin, M. 1986. Speech Genres and Other Late Essays. Austin TX: University of Texas Press. Benesch, S. 2001. Critical English for Academic Purposes. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Benesch, S. 2009. Theorizing and practicing critical English for academic purposes. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 8(2): 81–85. Bereiter, C. & Scardamalia, M. 1987. The Psychology of Written Composition. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Bernstein, B. 1990. Class, Codes and Control: Volume IV, The Structuring of Pedagogic Discourse. London: Taylor & Francis. Bhatia, V. K. 2008. Genre analysis, ESP and professional practice. English for Specific Purposes 27: 161–174. Biber, D. 2006. Stance in spoken and written university registers. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 52: 97–116. Bloch, J. 2007. Technologies in the Second Language Composition Classroom. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Bosher, S. 1998. The composing processes of three southeast Asian writers at the post-secondary level: An exploratory study. Journal of Second Language Writing 7(2): 205–233.



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Breen, M. & Littlejohn, A. (eds). 2000. Classroom Decision-making: Negotiation and Process Syllabuses in Practice. Cambridge: CUP. Bruce, I. 2008. Cognitive genre structures in Methods sections of research articles: A corpus study. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(1): 38–54. Bruffee, K. 1986. Social construction: Language and the authority of knowledge. A bibliographical essay. College English 48: 773–779. Cadman, K. 2002. English for Academic Possibilities: The research proposal as a contested site in postgraduate genre pedagogy. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 1(2): 85–104. Canagarajah, A. S. 2002. Globalization, methods, and practice in periphery classrooms. In Globalization and Language Teaching, D. Block & D. Cameron (eds), 134–150. London: Routledge. Carter-Thomas, S. & Rowley-Jolivet, E. 2008. If-conditionals in medical discourse: From theory to disciplinary practice. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(3): 191–205. Casanave, C. 2004. Controversies in Second Language Writing. Dilemmas and Decisions in Research and Instruction. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Chomsky, N. 1975. Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory. New York NY: Plenum Press. Christie, F. & Martin, J. (eds). 1997. Genre and Institutions: Social Processes in the Workplace and School. London: Cassell. Clark, R. & Ivanic, R. 1997. The Politics of Writing. London: Routledge. Dias, P. & Pare, P. (eds). 2000. Transitions: Writing in Academic and Workplace Settings. Cresskill NJ: Hampton Press. Dudley-Evans, T. & St John, M.-J. 1998. Developments in English for Specific Purposes. Cambridge: CUP. Fairclough, N. 1995. Critical Discourse Analysis. Harlow: Longman. Feez, S. 2001. Heritage and innovation in second language education. In Genre in the Classroom, A. M. Johns (ed.), 47–68. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Ferris, D. 2006. Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the short- and long-term effects of written error correction. In Feedback in Second Language Writing, K.€Hyland & F. Hyland (eds), 81–104. Cambridge: CUP. Flower, L. & Hayes, J. 1981. A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication 32: 365–387. Flower, L. 1994. The Construction of Negotiated Meaning A social Cognitive Theory of Writing. Carbondale IL: University of Southern Illinois Press. Freedman, A. 1994. Anyone for tennis? In Genre and the New Rhetoric, A. Freedman & P. Medway (eds), 43–66. London: Taylor & Francis. Gimenez, J. 2009. Beyond the academic essay: Discipline-specific writing in nursing and midwifery. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 7(3): 151–164. Goldstein, A. & Carr, P. 1996. Can students benefit from process writing? NCES Report, No. 3, Vol. 1: 96–845. Washington DC: National Centre for Educational Statistics. Haffner, C. & Candlin, C. 2007 Corpus tools as an affordance to learning in professional legal education. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 6(4): 303–318. Hall, K. & Harding, A. 2003. A Systematic Review of Effective Literacy Teaching in the 4–14 Age group. London: EPPI/ Institute of Education. Hammond, J. & Macken-Horarik, M. 1999. Critical literacy: Challenges and questions for ESL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly 33(3): 528–544. Hasan, R. 1996. Literacy, everyday talk and society. In Literacy in Society, R. Hasan & G. Williams (eds), 377–424. London: Longman.

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Hayes, J. 1996. A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications, M. Levy & S.€Ransdell (eds), 1–27. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hyland, F. 1998. The impact of teacher written feedback on individual writers. Journal of Second Language Writing 7(3): 255–286. Hyland, K. 2003. Second Language Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Hyland, K. 2004a. Genre and Second Language Writers. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. 2004b. Disciplinary Discourses: Social Interactions in Academic Writing. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Hyland, K. 2006. English for Academic Purposes: An Advanced Resource Book. London: Routledge. Hyland, K. 2007. Genre pedagogy: language, literacy and L2 writing instruction. Journal of Second Language Writing 16(3): 148–164. Hyland, K. 2008. Genre and academic writing in the disciplines Language Teaching 41(4): 543– 562. Hyland, K. 2009. Academic Discourse. London: Continuum. Hyland, K. 2010. Teaching and Researching Writing, 2nd edn. London: Pearson. Johns, A. M. 1997. Text, Role and Context: Developing Academic Literacies. Cambridge: CUP. Kennedy, G. 1987. Expressing temporal frequency in academic English. TESOL Quarterly 21: 69–86. Kent, T. (ed.). 1999. Post-process Theory: Beyond the Writing Process Paradigm. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Knapp, P. & Watkins, M. 1994. Context – Text – Grammar: Teaching the Genres and Grammar of School Writing in Infants and Primary Classrooms. Sydney: Text Productions. Kroll, B. (ed.) 2003. Exploring the Dynamics of Second Language Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Lung, J. 2008. Discursive hierarchical patterning in Law and Management cases. English for Specific Purposes 27(4): 424–441. Macken-Horarik, M. 2002. ‘Something to shoot for’: A systemic functional approach to teaching genre in secondary school science. In Genre in the Classroom: Multiple Perspectives, A.€Johns (ed.), 17–42. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Manchón, R. M., Roca de Larios, J. & Murphy, L. 2009. The temporal dimension and problemsolving nature of foreign language composing processes. Implications for theory. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts. Learning, Teaching and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 102–129. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Nelson, G. & Carson, J. 1998. ESL students’ perceptions of effectiveness in peer response groups. Journal of Second Language Writing 7(2): 113–131. Nystrand, M., Greene, S. & Wiemelt, J. 1993. Where did composition studies come from? An intellectual history. Written Communication 10: 207–333. Patthey-Chavez, G., Matsumura, L. & Valdes, R. 2004. Investigating the process approach to writing instruction in urban middle schools. Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 47(6): 642–676. Pritchard, R. & Honeycutt, R. 2006. The process approach to writing instruction: Examining its effectiveness. In Handbook of Writing Research, C. A. Macarthur, S. Graham & J. Fitzgerald (eds), 275–290. New York NY: The Guilford Press. Sasaki, M. 2007. Effects of study abroad experiences on EFL writers: A multiple-data analysis. The Modern Language Journal 91: 602–620.



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Sasaki, M. 2009. Changes in English as a foreign language students’ writing over 3.5 years: A sociocognitive account. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts. Learning, Teaching and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 49–76. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Saussure, F. 2006. Writings in General Linguistics. Oxford: OUP. Schoonen, R., Snellings, P., Stevenson, M. & van Gelderen, A. 2009. Towards a blueprint of the foreign language writer: The linguistic and cognitive demands of foreign language writing. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts. Learning, Teaching and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 77–101. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Shaw, P. & Liu, E. 1998. What develops in the development of second language writing? Applied Linguistics 19: 224–254. Shi, L. & Kubota, R. 2007. Patterns of rhetorical organization in Canadian and American language arts textbooks: An exploratory study. English for Specific Purposes 26(2): 180–202. Silva, T. & Brice, C. 2004. Research in teaching writing, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24: 70–106. Smagorinsky, P. (ed.). 2006. Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change. New York NY: Teachers College Press. Storch, N. 2005. Collaborative writing: Product, process, and students’ reflections. Journal of Second Language Writing 14(3): 153–173. Street, B. 1995. Social Literacies. Harlow: Longman. Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP. Swales, J. 2004. Research Genres. Cambridge: CUP. Swales, J. & Feak, C. 2004. Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills, 2nd edn. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Tottie, G. 1991. Negation in English Speech and Writing. London: Academic Press. Truscott, J. & Hsu, A. 2008. Error correction, revision, and learning. Journal of Second Language Writing 17(4): 292–305. van den Bergh, H. & Rijlaarsdam, G. 2001. Changes in cognitive activities during the writing process and relationships with text quality. Educational Psychology 21(4): 373–385. Wells, G. 1992. The centrality of talk in education. In Thinking Voices: The Work of the National Oracy Project, K. Norman (ed.), 283–310. London: Hodder and Stoughton. White, A. 2007. A tool for monitoring the development of written English: T-unit analysis using the SAWL. American Annals of the Deaf 152(1): 29–41. Zamel, V. 1983. The composing processes of advanced ESL students: six case-studies. TESOL Quarterly 17: 165–187.

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chapter 3

Writing to learn in content areas Research insights Alan Hirvela

Ohio State University

This chapter discusses several studies of second language (L2) writers’ experiences using writing as a means of learning about content areas. Though some research of this kind has demonstrated success with writing to learn, collectively these studies suggest that using writing in this way is often difficult for L2 writers and that a key component in the process of learning to use writing for this purpose is the kind of support provided by both writing instructors and content area teachers. The examination of these studies also points out complexities in the linkage between theories of writing to learn and implementation of them. The analysis of these studies also lends support to a recent call from some L2 writing researchers for an increased emphasis on longitudinal studies of L2 writing, including writing to learn, in light of the complex nature of learning how to write, and how to use writing to mediate or enrich learning, in another language.

Introduction We can look at writing to learn from two general perspectives: using writing to learn about writing itself (as discussed in Ken Hyland’s chapter), and using writing to learn about something else, i.e. as a mode of discovery or negotiation to acquire greater knowledge of content, culture, or language (see also the chapters by Manchón, Byrnes, and Ortega). In this chapter I look at the latter application of writing to learn: via such written forms as note taking, organizing outlines, composing summaries, writing in journals, and constructing syntheses, students make sense of the subject matter at hand, and so writing is said to promote learning of content. Writing in these cases operates as a tool for learning while students negotiate meaning and acquire disciplinary knowledge. In the first part of the chapter I will briefly review two major theoretical and pedagogical perspectives that have inspired research and pedagogy related to

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writing in the content areas (WLC). With these perspectives serving as a foundation, I will move in the second part of the chapter to a discussion of several studies on writing in the content areas. Here, due to space limitations as well as the volume’s focus on L2 learners, I will look only at studies from the L2 domain, though it should be noted that there is a rich body of L1-related research in this area. It is important to note here that the studies discussed in the chapter all took place in the United States. This is because, as pointed out in David Foster’s and Charles Russell’s important edited collection, Writing and Learning in CrossÂ�National Perspective (2002), significant differences exist in how the construct of writing to learn operates in and outside the United States. Both they and the authors in their collection show how writing as a tool for learning content is often an integral part of pre-university educational systems beyond the United States, whereas in the U.S. this emphasis does not appear until the university years. A closely related point is that it is more common outside the United States for students to begin their university studies with a discipline-specific orientation, so that a connection between writing and disciplinary acculturation is not only immediately established but also pursued as a natural part of the educational process. By contrast, students in American universities often do not begin to use writing as a tool for disciplinary learning until later in their university years. As a result, there is in the U.S. context what Foster and Russell call an “assumption of unreadiness” (p.€31) pertaining to first year university students in the U.S. that leads to an emphasis on mandatory writing courses intended, at least in part, to assist students in learning how to use writing for learning purposes, particularly in their future studies in their chosen academic discipline. An important consequence of these different emphases is a much greater focus on writing to learn research in the United States, since writing for this purpose is, as Foster and Russell pointed out in their ‘unreadiness’ observation, seen as a more problematic or complex issue there. However, there is interest in writing to learn outside the U.S. In addition to the Foster and Russell collection just cited, see, for example, Tynjala, Mason, and Lonka (2001). Furthermore, as Manchón and de Haan (2008) point out in their introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing devoted to writing in foreign language contexts (that is, other than English as a second language), there is a rapidly growing interest in foreign language writing. Given this growth, it seems likely that there will be a shift to studies of foreign language writing within the WLC framework.



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

Theoretical and pedagogical perspectives There are two broad realms from which writing in the content areas, or writing for learning content (WLC), has evolved: (1) Writing to Learn and what has historically been called (2) Content-Based Instruction (CBLT) and, more recently, particularly in the European context, Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL). CBLT and CLIL draw to some extent on Writing to Learn, although they are more directly related to L2 learners and learning, and they involve more than the skill of writing. Each of these two realms is explored in this section of the chapter.

Writing to learn Contemporary scholarship in this area is generally seen to begin with Janet Emig’s (1977) ground-breaking article, “Writing as a Mode of Learning,” in which she foregrounded writing as a heuristic device aimed at enhancing student learning about different school-based subjects and in the process promoting learning. As Emig explained, “Writing represents a unique mode of learning … Writing serves learning uniquely because writing as a process-and-product possesses a cluster of attributes that correspond uniquely to certain powerful learning strategies” (p.€122). Anne Herrington (1981:â•›186) notes that “the primary purpose of any writing assignment … is to learn,” and James Britton (1983:â•›223) expands on this when he points out that a key purpose of writing in educational setting is learning understood as including “organizing our knowledge of the world and extending it in an organized way so that it remains coherent, unified, reliable”. Judith Langer (1986:â•›400) argues this is possible because “writing can lead to extensive rethinking, revising, and reformulating of what one knows.” Vacca and Linek (1992:â•›145) put it in these terms: “To find meaning and purpose in learning, students must be encouraged to think about what they are learning – and therein lies the power of writing.” Or, as McGinley and Tierney (1989:â•›243) explain, a common belief underlying writing to learn “is the belief that writing actually engenders understanding by virtue of the exploration and reexamination of ideas that it affords.” Schumacher and Gradwohl Nash (1991:â•›92) assert that this may not result so much in the creation of new knowledge but rather that “the power of writing would appear to be in helping to reconceptualize certain aspects of our knowledge.” George Newell (1998:â•›197) says that, given the perspectives already described, writing to learn is “supportive of a vision of teaching and learning that enables students not only to know but to do.” At the heart of all this, according to the National Commission on Writing (2003:â•›14) report in the United States, is that “writing is how

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students connect the dots in their knowledge” as they move across the curriculum and use writing in different courses. One of the most influential studies of such writing activity was reported in Langer and Applebee’s (1987) book, How Writing Shapes Thinking, which describes an extensive study of secondary school content area teachers’ use of writing to enhance learning. Working from the belief that “written language not only makes ideas more widely and easily available, it changes the development and shape of the ideas themselves” (p. 3), Langer and Applebee explored how science and social studies teachers employed writing to learn activities to promote content area learning. In their analysis of the study’s results, Langer and Applebee arrived at three conclusions which have been influential in shaping subsequent investigations of WLC: In working with teachers, we learned that subject-area writing can be used productively in three primary ways: (1) to gain relevant knowledge and experience in preparing for new activities; (2) to review and consolidate what is known or has been learned; (3) to reformulate and extend ideas and experiences.  (Langer & Applebee 1987:â•›136)

Viewing writing in this way has had profound implications for research and pedagogy. In addition to Langer and Applebee, in the 1980s a number of writing researchers, particularly in the United Kingdom and the United States, began to look at writing as learning in the ways in which it was manifested in various disciplines, especially within school settings (that is, before university study), often within the context of one specific discipline, such as history. With respect to pedagogy, this interest in writing to learn led to the development of the highly influential Writing Across the Curriculum movement, particularly in the United States, where writing is portrayed as a powerful force in disciplinary based learning and students are taught how to use writing as they move across disciplines in the course of their studies. The Writing Across the Curriculum movement remains a powerful one today, particularly at the college level in the U.S. (see Newell 2006 for an overview of recent approaches).

Content-Based Instruction/Content and Language Integrated Learning Writing to learn (and its major application, writing across the curriculum) has had its greatest appeal in the L1 domain, in that students already possess the language of the content areas as a native language and can focus on using it in written form to acquire or strengthen content area knowledge. Since language learning is not a part of the pedagogical equation, teachers can direct their attention to how writing itself can operate as a meditational tool. Content-Based Instruction (CBI)



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

and, in recent years, Content and Language Integrated Language Learning (CLIL), are the domains in which the L2 field has attempted to carve its own niche. While there is in CBI and CLIL some influence from some of the key principles and objectives of writing to learn/writing across the curriculum, perhaps the greater impact has come from the field of second language acquisition (SLA). CBI is found principally in the English as a second language (ESL) context. Kasper (2000:â•›viii) defines CBI broadly in these terms: “In a content-based course, ESL students use English to expand their existing knowledge bases, as they are presented with interdisciplinary material in a meaningful, contextualized form in which the primary focus is on the acquisition of content area information.” Using the target language in different modalities (reading, writing, listening, speaking), they obtain content area knowledge. In the process, second language acquisition also occurs, as the target language is an object of learning as well as a means of acquiring information and understanding. As Brinton, Snow, and Wesche note in their influential 1989 book, Content-Based Second Language Instruction, “language is most effectively learned in context” (p. 1). Building on this belief, they identify five rationales for building instruction around the content-based model€(p.€3): 1. ESL teaching should consider how learners will eventually use (outside the ESL classroom) what they are taught; 2. Content taken from other courses that students must learn anyway will be seen by them as especially relevant and thus increase their motivation to learn; 3. Teaching should account for the knowledge learners already possess from prior experience, including content knowledge and overall knowledge of the academic environment; 4. A course should focus on actual, contextualized uses of the target language rather than decontextualized principles of language use; 5. Learners need to be exposed to meaningful and comprehensible input in order to move to new levels of second language ability, in line with theories of the importance of input provided by SLA researchers. The key in CBI is to bring aspects of content-area knowledge to the language classroom and thus make learning more meaningful and long-lasting because of the extent to which it can be applied to achieve academic success. Writing plays an important role in CBI, since it is often through writing, in one form or another, that learners will have to express what they know in the content areas as well as engage the content areas. CLIL operates on the same core principles embedded in CBI but represents a more elaborated application of CBI. This is closely related to the importance

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it has acquired in Europe in conjunction with the rise of the European Union (EU) and the multilingual nature of Europe, where foreign languages have both instrumental and personal value and appeal and where being multilingual is, if not a necessity, at least a strongly desired trait. Where CBI has been developed primarily to assist English language learners who are living in an English dominant environment and who must therefore acquire the language to succeed both in and outside the school setting, CLIL promotes and fosters linguistic diversity in ways that transcend the more ‘survival’ oriented nature of CBI. Multilingualism is encouraged and enabled via CLIL not only for practical purposes, but also to generate a common bond or sense of unity across the EU by enhancing opportunities for interaction. For instance, as noted by the European Commission (2008), CLIL places a strong emphasis on such goals as intercultural knowledge, understanding, and communication. Indeed, the cultural component is central to learning in the CLIL framework, whereas in CBI the focus is on the acquisition of academic content and the language related to it. CLIL also “develops multilingual interests and attitudes” (European Commission 2008) and in the process is closely aligned with key objectives of the EU. As such, the EU has developed initiatives which recognize CLIL as an important component in the instantiation of the EU’s€goals. The undergraduate German as a foreign language program at Georgetown University in the United States represents a notable application of CLIL principles. As Heidi Byrnes explains in her chapter in this volume (Chapter 7), this foreign language program “relies on writing as an advantageous environment” for both language learning and the learning of content across a number of domains related to German society and culture, with a particular emphasis on culture and on the use of different kinds of genres important in the German context. There is another notable difference between CLIL and CBI. In CLIL, the subject or content area teachers themselves often speak the target languages being used and learned via a content-based pedagogy, whereas in CBI the language teacher is at least partly involved in helping learners acquire both the content knowledge and the target language, often in collaboration with subject area teachers. Yolanda Ruiz de Zarobe and Rosa María Jiménez Catalán offer a number of valuable demonstrations of this use of CLIL in their 2009 edited volume, Content and Language Integrated Learning: Evidence from Research in Europe. One particularly interesting application of CLIL is demonstrated in Lyster’s (2007) book, Learning and Teaching Languages Through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach, in which he extends the framework established earlier by CBI. ‘Counterbalancing’ occurs through a carefully managed combination of form-focused and content-based pedagogical practices which, experienced in the course



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

of obtaining subject area knowledge, contribute to learners’ interlanguage development and thus promote second language acquisition, with content serving as the means through which teachers and learners negotiate the intricacies of the target language.

Writing and content learning research The field of L2 writing has generated a strong research base and gradually established itself as a discipline in its own right, particularly since the early 1990s. This is made abundantly clear in the recently published volume, A Synthesis of Research on Second Language Writing in English (2008) by Leki, Cumming, and Silva. However, there is relatively little research that looks at writing to learn and content area learning, and what does exist focuses on the ESL context, even though there has been encouragement to explore writing to learn within the broader L2 framework since at least as far back as the late 1970s (e.g. Widdowson 1978). The research that has been conducted has been almost exclusively qualitative in nature, and while the amount of such published research is small, what has been published provides rich portraits of this kind of writing. In this section I will discuss a handful of studies of this kind. These fall into two categories: ‘stand alone’ studies that were not part of a larger research agenda, and ‘co-mingled’ studies that, while operating as individual case studies, were also connected to a larger group of studies investigating the same issues and questions. What we will see in the review of these two research strands, by way of a general introduction to the studies discussed, is that they have produced a mixed picture with respect to (a) students’ success in employing writing to learn, and (b)€the complexity involved in successfully linking the intrinsic appeal of the theories underlying approaches such as writing across the curriculum, CBI, and CLIL, and effective implementation of them. The fact that they continue to yield inconsistent results years after their development is a sobering reminder of the challenges involved in connecting theory and praxis.

‘Stand alone’ studies WLC studies of this kind constitute a small portion of the overall body of WLC research, but they have made important contributions to our understanding of the relationship(s) between writing and learning. Two of these studies, by Ruth Spack (1997) and Trudy Smoke (1994), are discussed here because they highlight an essential feature of WLC in the L2 context: the gradual but powerful effect

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that WLC can have, especially compared to writing as a focus of instruction in L2 writing courses. Each of the research participants discussed in these studies ultimately learned more about L2 writing when employing it for content-based learning than when studying it as a subject of its own. Just as importantly, this value they discovered for L2 writing evolved over time. This is a key feature of WLC: it is a not a skill set acquired easily or quickly, particularly for L2 writers. A third stand alone study discussed in this section is Alan Hirvela’s (2005) research on the role of the computer in WLC. This study was selected because it draws attention to the need to look at WLC in the contemporary context in which literacy is enacted across both print-based and computer-based domains, whereas in earlier WLC research writing (and reading) were centered in the traditional print-based modality. Ruth Spack’s (1997) article, “The Acquisition of Academic Literacy in a Second Language: A Longitudinal Case Study,” is widely regarded as a landmark study in both WLC and, more broadly, the L2 writing field. Spack conducted a long-term study: a three year exploration of the writing experiences of a Japanese undergraduate student named Yuko at an American university. Noting that “Most investigations of students’ writing practices have been limited to the English classroom” (pp. 3–4), Spack studied Yuko’s experience across a range of writing and social science courses, as Yuko moved between majoring in international relations, political science, and economics. She also made the powerful assertion that longitudinal studies – then a rarity in L2 writing research and still an underutilized approach to the study of L2 writing – were essential if a fuller picture of L2 students’ writing was to emerge: “we need to investigate what it means for students to undergo a long and ever-changing process of acquiring – that is, internalizing and gaining ownership of it – academic literacy, defined here as the ability to read and write the various texts assigned in college” (p. 4). The same point can be made about WLC research: given the challenges related to instantiating writing to learn skills, a longitudinal perspective is far more likely to produce meaningful insights into the ways in which L2 writers develop the ability to connect writing and content area learning. In addition, she advanced both L2 writing research and writing to learn/writing in the content areas by broadening the research focus to include reading as well as writing under the more inclusive term ‘academic literacy’, recognizing the key roles that reading plays in learning as well as in academic writing. Spack (1997) provides a detailed look at several of the content and writing courses Yuko took over the three year period and shows how Yuko’s confidence gradually grew with respect to her academic literacy ability. With respect to reading, Yuko went from avoiding altogether courses that entailed reading assignments, to overcoming completely “her fear of reading” in her content courses



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

(p.€43), and “this was true not only of books and articles but also of writing assignments” (p. 43). With respect to writing, a key change was that she had finally become “conscious of a difference between informative and analytical discourse” (p.€46), both of which she was required to produce in her content courses. She had also learned how to use sources effectively and to engage in critical thinking. Spack highlights how this occurred in her observation that “The experience of writing and revising journal entries in her sociology class showed her a way to use writing to clarify reading and to put social scientists’ ideas into her own words” (p.€46). Another key change was that she had learned to balance what she had learned of writing in her native Japanese with the demands of academic writing (and reading) in English. Summing up Yuko’s experiences, Spack (1997:â•›47) asserted that Overall, Yuko matured as a reader and writer as she received meaningful input from numerous classroom experiences and from instructors who were conversant in their own fields and who could provide guidance for the work in particular courses. She learned through continual practice, by becoming immersed in the subject matter, and by talking about her projects with those who could share their expertise. 

Here we see an important feature of WLC: writing became a valuable tool for learning by placing assigned content area reading material into perspective and then by building Yuko’s self-confidence with respect to academic literacy. Being able to talk about writing and reading demands was also of great importance to her (and, as we will see shortly, for Ming, the participant in Smoke’s 1994 study). On the whole, Spack’s article reinforced the importance of writing as it relates to content area experience. Also of value were her findings regarding the developmental aspect of writing to learn and writing in the content areas. That is, Spack’s study shows that empowering students to use writing to learn within the content areas is a process that takes time and must be approached from that perspective. Viewing WLC in this development light is crucial to understanding its pedagogical value and potential. Trudy Smoke’s 1994 article, “Writing as a Means of Learning,” stands as an early and notable effort to examine, in-depth, a second language writer’s experiences with writing across different content areas. This was at a university in New York. Smoke explored, over a period of six years, the writing of Ming, an undergraduate student from China who initially struggled significantly with academic writing in English, so much so that she, in her first two years as a college student, failed, several times, the required ESL writing course she was taking. During this time she was majoring in accounting and, as a result of that major, did very little writing outside her ESL composition course. Acting on the advice

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of a counselor, Ming changed to a double major in education and sociology, that is, content areas where she was required to do a good deal of writing. A turning point for her was her third year of study, when she enrolled in an upper level ESL writing course operating within the CBI framework. That is, it was linked with a social science course. It was during this joint writing experience, according to Smoke, that “Ming realized that writing was going to be a valuable tool for learning” (p.€4). More specifically, says Smoke, “She had discovered that writing could be a vehicle for synthesizing her ideas, analyzing what she was learning, and creating new knowledge” (p. 4). In this regard Ming was much like the native English speaking students in Langer and Applebee’s study sited earlier. WLC had the same effects on Ming as it did on many of Langer and Applebee’s participants, and the conclusions about WLC that Langer and Applebee arrived at could be applied to Ming, and quite likely other L2 writers, as well. Ming also discovered that talking with others and creating a social network that worked together in decoding what needed to be learned in the content area courses and how writing operated within them was an important source of support. As Smoke goes on to observe, “Ming’s college experience was transformed by her discovery that she could use writing as a tool for learning” (p. 9). Her ability to use writing to learn enabled her to eventually achieve the success as a college student she had sought. The importance of speaking in Ming’s experience of WLC is also worth noting. For Ming there was an important link between speaking and writing that maximized the effects and benefits of WLC. This connection between writing and speaking as it relates to WLC is one that has received surprisingly little attention in WLC research. (See Weissberg 2006 and Belcher & Hirvela 2008, for recent explorations of speaking-writing connections that can be applied to WLC.) As discussed briefly earlier, Hirvela’s (2005) article “Computer-Based Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum: Two Case Studies of L2 Writers,” is an example of a newer line of WLC research that brings multimodality into the equation by addressing the use of computer-related resources (in addition to traditional print-based resources) in connection with WLC. While not longitudinal in nature like Smoke and Spack’s studies, and focused more on the nature of the writing and reading activities required across the curriculum, this study highlights the need to account for various modalities in WLC research. Hirvela’s study investigated the kinds of writing and reading activities two Korean undergraduate students, Mihyun (nursing major) and Junghoon (architecture major), experienced during one academic quarter of study, with a particular focus on the amount and nature of computer-related activity they experienced. In addition to their writing courses, Hirvela looked at what took place in their undergraduate courses in maths, statistics, nursing, East Asian language and literature, and architecture. One of his findings was that “electronically mediated



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

reading of some kind was common across courses” (p. 351), including frequent searches for online materials to be used for class discussions and/or the writing of papers as well as considerable use of course websites to access information about classes and sources needed for them. He also found that “writing, in one form or another, played a role in how the participants’ knowledge and performance would be judged, and that both participants often performed some type of computerbased writing” (p. 351). Meanwhile, another finding was that “at no point in these courses was there instruction in how to use the computer to perform any of the literate acts expected of students” (p. 352), as it appeared that faculty assumed students already possessed the kinds of computer literacy skills they would need. What is important in Hirvela’s study with respect to writing to learn in the content areas is the finding that both print-based and computer-based literacy skills are required as students move across the spectrum of content courses. This can impact on the nature of the content area learning that students must gain command of, as they must access and learn content in both the print and electronic domains of literacy, and thus on how writing can function as a heuristic device for learning in each domain. Hirvela concluded about his findings that they suggest that there is important work to be done in ESL writing courses with regard to preparing undergraduate students to compose (as writers and readers) electronically as they make their curricular journey through the discourse communities they will visit during their collegiate studies, and that, ideally, this work would be done in collaboration with disciplinary faculty within a writing across the curriculum framework.  (Hirvela 2005:â•›354)

Given the ubiquity of computers in the contemporary academic world and the increasingly heavy electronically-oriented literacy demands students face as they move among content courses, it appears that more research needs to be conducted within this framework if a better understanding of writing as it relates to learning in the content areas is to be achieved.

‘Co-mingled’ studies By ‘co-mingled’ studies I mean case studies that have been researched and written within a larger, comparative framework involving more than one participant. This kind of research design provides writing researchers with additional depth beyond ‘stand-alone’ case studies by enabling them to look at how students from differing backgrounds have experienced similar situations. In this way they can make valuable comparisons and contrasts of students’ experiences with WLC. Studies of this kind constitute the bulk of the significant WLC research and are

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invaluable in revealing the many complexities and nuances inherent in WLC teaching and learning. What stands out in this strand of WLC research is how complicated and unpredictable the WLC experience can be for L2 writers. These studies do not constitute an argument against WLC, but they do perform a cautionary role with respect to use of WLC. We see that, for various reasons, not all L2 students are receptive to WLC, for a variety of reasons that are not necessarily directly related to WLC but must be accounted for in attempting to implement a pedagogy rooted in WLC principles and activities. In this section I discuss three book-length studies that look at writing across the content areas and investigate students’ development and use of writing ability over an extended period of time. These books represent an interesting contrast with earlier and influential book-length studies of WLC such as Langer & Applebee’s (1987) How Writing Shapes Thinking (cited earlier) and Applebee & Langer’s (1984) Contexts for Learning to Write: Studies of Secondary School Instruction. First, the books discussed here focus on university level WLC contexts, while the Applebee and Langer volumes examine secondary school settings. Second, where the work of Applebee and Langer focused on the teachers and the classrooms, the volumes I discuss represent a shift in WLC to a focus on the students undergoing the WLC experience. Third, these three books explore the experiences of both L1 and L2 students. I look only at the case studies involving L2 writers. Marilyn Sternglass’s (1997) book, Time to Know Then: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level, presents a study that ran for six years and examines the experiences of nine students at City College in New York, including three students who were L2 writers: Ricardo, originally from Puerto Rico; Delores, originally from the Dominican Republic; and Jacob, originally from Korea. Of these, Ricardo and Jacob receive much fuller treatment in separate case studies presented later in the book, and so they will be discussed in this section. Ricardo had been educated, in Spanish, in Puerto Rico through secondary school and had fairly limited experience with writing in English when he came to City College. While there he failed, seven times, the school’s mandatory Writing Achievement Test that must be passed before students have compiled 60 credit hours. Despite these failures, he consistently earned A and B grades in his other courses, including his major, communications. Furthermore, “Writing was always an important means of presentation for Ricardo, and he used it consistently as a basis for learning” (p. 224). He had acquired this sense of writing as a tool for learning through his writing in Spanish in Puerto Rico, where he had developed the practice of writing notes about material he had read just after reading it. He immediately adopted that approach in his college level study, and with success. As



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

Sternglass saw it, “Writing had made him able to question readings and analyze them in more depth” (p. 227). In particular, she said, “Ricardo had developed note-taking and writing strategies that made it possible for him to succeed in difficult courses. By writing first and analyzing later, he was able to sort out the important concepts when he had enough time to devote to studying” (p. 239). Ricardo’s ability to successfully transfer writing to learn strategies from his L1, Spanish, to difficult reading and writing work in English is noteworthy in better understanding writing to learn, as was his ability to shape those strategies to the demands of different courses and different disciplinary realms. The issue of L1 to L2 transfer is a particularly noteworthy addition to research in the L2 WLC context, including the kind of writing activity (note-taking) in the L1 that Ricardo was able to transfer and use so productively in the L2. Jacob’s case study is quite different than that of Ricardo’s, with the exception that he, like Ricardo, had developed effective note-taking strategies which he used across his courses. Born in Korea, Jacob, a physics major, had been educated in English in Australia for a number of years before starting his college level study in New York. He was attracted to creative writing and was unhappy about what he saw as the formulaic nature of academic writing. However, he recognized the functional value of formulaic writing and became adept at utilizing the formulas with minimal effort; indeed, a goal of his was to devote the least amount of energy he could to academic writing while producing good papers and thus ‘fooling’ his instructors. As Sternglass observed, he had, in his appropriation of formulaic writing skills, gained command of “thinking, padding and stretching out small amounts of information to fulfill length requirements” (p. 288) for his content area papers. For him the writing of papers, especially research papers, was a trivial game that he was contemptuous of at the same time that he ensured his success in such writing by utilizing whatever formula was necessary. Under these circumstances, he was not given to extensive use of writing to learn. Worth noting, however, was his approach to note-taking. He had developed what he called a “condensation” style that he employed across his content courses. As he described it, “I copy notes, condense them and rewrite them. My class notes are messy and not organized. I take the relevant text notes and put them together and try to organize them” (p.€282). This approach to WLC worked especially well in his preparation for examinations. Here, as with Ming in Smoke’s study and Ricardo in Sternglass’s study, we see how writing operates as a kind of support system that allows rethinking about content subject matter during the act of writing. Anne Herrington and Marcia Curtis’s book, Persons in Process: Four Studies of Writing and Personal Development in College (2000) reports on the writing experiences of four undergraduate students at an American university over the course of their undergraduate careers (with the exception of Nam, one of the

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participants discussed in this chapter, who left the university after his first year of study). It, too, both problematizes and enriches our understanding of WLC. As in Sternglass’s study, they sought to account for the personal dimensions of student writers and how these dimensions impacted on their approaches to and attitudes toward academic writing. In their introduction they speak of their participants’ “variously phrased wish to compose a coherent, intelligible self ” (p.€5) while meeting the academic demands of undergraduate study. Their study consisted of looking at the participants’ writing in their first year writing courses and selected content area courses. Two of their participants were L2 writers, and they will be discussed in the next few paragraphs. One of these participants was Nam, whose family had immigrated to the United States from Vietnam while he was in elementary school. As he proceeded toward college, a key aspect of academic writing in English he had acquired was the venerable “five paragraph essay” structure, which he had learned to depend on. As he moved through his college level writing courses, he quickly discovered that this model, while of some functional value, was not adequate to meet the writing demands he faced, nor did it allow him to express and represent himself fully in the kinds of writing expected of him. He gradually weaned himself off of his dependence on such a formulaic approach to academic writing and gained a broader, more comfortable view of “what an essay is.” However, in the two content area courses studied by the researchers, one in psychology and the other in philosophy, he encountered significant problems in writing for the courses and seeing how writing helped his understanding of the content of the courses. This was particularly true in his “Methods of Inquiry in Psychology” course, which looked at quantitative research methods and how to report on and discuss such data. As he proceeded through the two courses, Nam adopted an accommodationist kind of writing strategy in which he mechanically appropriated the surface features of different genres of writing (and learning) and met, without any sense of satisfaction or real learning, the requirements of the courses. As he concluded, “It’s quicker to write their way, than my own” (p. 109). For him, then, writing as a form of learning did not emerge. He gained only a superficial command of the genres of writing that could have enabled him to enrich his content knowledge, and he was seemingly unable to develop a real understanding of writing’s role as a tool for learning. Whether the problems with WLC he encountered were more closely related to his own notions of writing and his ability to write in the L2 or to WLC itself is difficult to say, but his case is a reminder of the challenges involved in connecting writing and learning. Their other case study of a second language writer, a student named Francois, is useful in the way it introduces another variable into the WLC equation: the role of identity. Francois was a trilingual individual who was intentionally vague about



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

his background and his linguistic identity. Because he had been “Americanized” after moving to the United States prior to his college years, he at first claimed that English must be his native language. Later he offered the view that he was equally comfortable in French and Spanish as the L1. This reluctance to reveal his true identity (linguistic and personal) shaped his experiences as a college level writer as well. Indeed, the research assistant for the study called him the “cheerful resister” (p. 274), and this term seemed to characterize his approach to academic writing. To protect or conceal his real identity, in his academic writing he liked to adopt a “just spitting back” (p. 288) approach that gave his readers what he believed they wanted as opposed to what he wanted. This approach started in his college writing courses and extended to his content course writing, where he continued to be unwilling to reveal what he called his true self or real beliefs. Perhaps not surprisingly, Francois had a difficult time in his content area writing and apparently never recognized, or accepted, the idea that writing could enhance content learning. Though his “just spitting back” approach could be transferred to content-based learning and writing, it allowed for no meaningful connection with WCL. Having distanced himself from writing (at least in English), he was unable to conceptualize writing in ways that would allow him to meaningfully engage and learn content area knowledge. He needed an identity linked to target language writing in order to embrace the full value of writing, including writing for learning. The importance he attached to identity, and the negative impact this seemingly had on his engagement with WLC, adds another dimension to our understanding of the challenges associated with WLC. Also interesting in his case, and potentially important in discussions of WLC, particularly as related to CLIL and its roots in multilingual Europe, is his status as a trilingual individual with, seemingly, no clearcut L1 or linguistic identity. Another significant book-length, longitudinal study related to writing and the content areas is Ilona Leki’s Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development (2007), which describes four case studies of L2 writers over a five year period at an American university. Similar to the books by Sternglass and Herrington and Curtis, Leki was interested in her participants’ personal stories and experiences and how they impacted on their academic literacy development, not just the purely academic experiences alone. She also shared Spack’s interest in looking deeply at the realm of reading. While acknowledging the contributions of previous case studies of lesser duration, Leki also noted “how constricted the view of the students and of the students’ experiences has been” (p. 2) and thus set out to construct a deeper and more inclusive view of their journey through the world of undergraduate academic literacy, including WLC. Her participants included two from China as well as one student from Poland and one from Japan. The diversity of their experiences with writing

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and learning as they moved through their content area courses is a vital reminder of how such experiences cannot be codified into neat and simple categories and how complex the world of writing in the content areas is. The two students from China, Ben and Yang, present a very interesting set of contrasts regarding writing and the content areas. As an engineering major, Ben did relatively little writing in his major courses and virtually none in his non-�major content courses. The writing he did do in his major courses was not particularly challenging to him, as it was mostly straightforward writing about experiments conducted during lab sessions. Furthermore, it was usually done in connection with group projects, and he tended to contribute very little to the writing aspect of these projects. As Leki reports, he did find some value in writing for learning in his content courses, but in an indirect way: Ben did not appear to believe that learning happened during the writing, that writing caused discovery of meaning. Rather, learning happened because of the prolonged contact with the subject matter that came as the result of the requirement to write. In other words, it was pushing oneself to think longer and harder about a subject that resulted in learning; the requirement to write about something provided an occasion to think longer and harder. But then presumably so would discussion, reading, even just thinking.  (Leki 2007:╛31)

Thus, Ben did not foreground any role for writing as a means of learning, though he seemingly recognized that learning was an outcome of writing for the content courses. Yang, the nursing major who was also from China, had a very different undergraduate career than did Ben, and a rather different relationship with writing, in that she saw writing primarily as a means for building fluency in language use, not the expression of content. Where Ben moved through his undergraduate study with relative ease, for Yang college was a constant challenge, and, as Leki concluded, “Finishing college for Yang was like escaping prison” (p. 119). This was partly because she was not a nursing major by choice; she pursued the major at the insistence of her husband. In addition, she struggled constantly with English, both spoken and written. She also encountered cross-cultural problems, and these, like her difficulties with English, impacted significantly on her content area writing. Leki notes that the nursing faculty placed a great deal of emphasis on grammatical correctness in writing, and so Yang struggled constantly to meet the language expectations for her written assignments. In order to satisfy the grammatical correctness expectation, she was not able to focus significantly on content or rhetorical issues, thus limiting the role of writing for learning purposes. Also, not being from the United States, she often had difficulties understanding the behavior of patients, which, as Leki points out, was culturally based to some extent.



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

This made it difficult for Yang to accurately capture their behavior in her writing, such as case studies. While writing for her content area courses was a significant challenge for Yang, she did appreciate it in one respect: it gave her opportunities to think carefully about her language use and thus attempt to improve her command of English. She apparently did not conceptualize writing as a means of learning about content, as her focus was too heavily on overcoming her language problems as well as the cross-cultural misunderstandings she struggled with. The one similarity she shared with Ben was that writing did not play a significant role in her undergraduate education. Jan, an immigrant from Poland (who came to the United States while he was in high school), presents yet another view of WCL. He was, as Leki points out, difficult to understand because of sharp contrasts in his behavior: Although in class he invariably presented the very model of the diligent, industrious international student who has to work twice as hard as domestic students to do well at the university, Jan mainly worked hard and in a variety of inventive ways at his goal of beating the system.  (Leki 2007:â•›127)

As for writing, he came to believe that “his eventual success and confidence in writing in English developed as a result of a great deal of practice writing” (p.€139). While he was actually required to do very little writing in his content courses, when he had to write, he produced multiple drafts of his papers and thus learned how to write through that practice. With respect to writing and learning in the content areas, though, he expressed sharply contrasting beliefs that, as with Ben and Yang in Leki’s study, raise questions about content area writing. On one occasion, when asked about the contributions of writing to his content area learning, “he noted that this writing helped him understand course material because to do the writing he had to do the reading and doing the reading made him understand the course material” (p. 345). He also explained that “When you are writing…you’re thinking, you memorize more, so it stays in my head pretty much. Long, long, long time” (p. 345). On another occasion, though, when asked about how much help writing had provided help for him in his classes, he replied “Not at all” (p. 345). Presenting a sharp contrast to the other three participants was Yuko, a social work major from Japan. College was a much more meaningful experience for her than it was for Yang and Jan, and she engaged it with a greater effort than did Ben. She also approached writing much more seriously and, as Leki notes with respect to the content areas, “She also made the best use of writing as a means of furthering her development as a social worker, selecting writing topics in nonsocial work classes whenever she could that matched her social work interests”

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(pp.€187–188). And yet she expressed mixed and complex attitudes toward the role of writing in learning in her content area. As Leki explains: Yuko mentioned the relative uselessness of writing (writing as just an assignment) more often than she did its usefulness in terms of developing understanding, increasing knowledge, or learning course content and described writing as a mechanism to facilitate or provide occasion for the development of other skills, sometimes improve her academic style, sometimes her social work style, sometimes her recording abilities.  (Leki 2007:â•›205)

In other words, she saw value for writing in her professional development as a social worker, and she did acknowledge that writing papers had helped her grasp social work theory. However, in the final analysis, Yuko appeared to sense a unique benefit of writing in terms of pushed output not only for language growth but for growth of disciplinary knowledge as well. But in the end Yuko reported that the main aids in helping her learn the body of knowledge and the skills important for her social work education were not writing assignments but rather previous knowledge, previous training, lectures and readings, effort, and peers.  (Leki 2007:â•›206)

For Yuko, then, as for the other participants in Leki’s study, writing in the content areas was apparently not of great value. Given the length and depth of Leki’s study, these results are somewhat sobering, and they raise important questions about linking theory and practice as related to using writing for learning purposes. One potential problem, at least in the L2 context, is that the theories do not account for the writerly selves that L2 students bring to writing in the target language. That is, when they engage more intently in writing in the L2, they already possess knowledge of and ideas about writing from their L1 background, as we saw in the earlier case study of Ricardo, for whom his L1, Spanish, was an asset in WLC in English. L2 writing for these individuals is not a neutral act. While their already existing knowledge of and ability in writing via the L1 can be beneficial in L2 writing, they can create barriers as well. If, for example, they are successful writers (and students) in the L1 context, the confidence arising from this success might prevent them from fully recognizing how writing as a tool for learning in the L2 framework is not the same kind of experience, particularly since they are still learning to write in the L2 while attempting to use this emerging tool to enhance learning content. In short, they might rely on a false sense of confidence that generates incorrect assumptions about L1-L2 transfer. Thus, they may attempt to import into the L2 context writing to learn strategies that worked in the L1 setting but, due to rhetorical and cultural differences between the L1 and L2, might not align well with L2 learning situations. Once again, though, it is worth noting that



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

Ricardo experienced positive engagement and transfer between the L1 and the L2. On the whole, though, it appears that the notion of transfer between L1 and L2 is complicated and in need of much more research. In addition, these theories do not account for the kind of language-based experiences Yang and Yuko in Leki’s study encountered. That is, preoccupied with difficulties in using the target language, English, they were not yet ready to see writing in the L2 in the ways foregrounded by writing to learn theories. Those theories appear to assume a certain already existing level of L2 proficiency. Therefore, just as these theories need to account for what L2 writers bring to writing to learn from their L1 backgrounds, they also need to factor in the sometimes significant barrier that language learning difficulties present. Without the necessary target language proficiency strongly in place, L2 writers are not yet equipped to use writing as a means of learning content.

Conclusion What have we learned in this review of the WLC dimension of L2 writing explored in the book? First and foremost, there is no clear, straightforward picture of the role writing plays for L2 writers as they move across the content areas. As we have seen, most notably in Ming and Yuko in the studies by Smoke and Spack, and to some extent with Ricardo and Jacob in Sternglass’s study, writing can play a valuable role for some L2 learners/writers. We have also seen an important development dimension to WLC. That is, the ability to engage successfully in WCL while enhancing L2 writing ability is more likely to occur slowly. Patience is required in an implementation of WLC. This was the case for Ming, Yuko, Ricardo, and Jacob. However, among the other participants in the studies reviewed, writing for learning was apparently not a major tool. This diversity of experiences is reflected in Table 1 below, which portrays, impressionistically, the apparent relationship between writing and learning among these students. Looked at collectively, these results are somewhat disappointing, particularly when viewed from the perspective offered by Weigle (2002:â•›4–5): The value of being able to write effectively increases as students progress through compulsory education on to higher education. At the university level, in particular, writing is seen not just as a standardized system of communication but also as an essential tool for learning. At least in the English-speaking world, one of the main functions of writing at high levels of education is to expand one’s knowledgethrough reflection rather than simply to communicate information.

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Table 1.╇ L2 writers’ relationship with writing as tool for learning Participant

Academic major

Relationship to writing to learn

Ming (1994) Yuko (1997)

Education/Sociology International Relations/Political Science/Economics Nursing Architecture Communications Physics (None) Sociology Engineering Nursing Business Social Work

Strong Strong

Mihyun (2005) Junghoon (2005) Ricardo (1997) Jacob (1997) Nam (2000) Francois (2000) Ben (2007) Yang (2007) Jan (2007) Yuko (2007)

Minimal Minimal Strong Fairly strong Mild Mild Mild Mild Mild Mild

Given this perspective, that only some of these 12 research participants across several studies and a wide variety of disciplinary fields appeared to have a strong relationship with WLC suggests that much more needs to be done in writing courses to foreground the role of writing as a means of learning (though, to be fair, to what extent this occurred in their writing courses is unclear). Perhaps the most important point that emerges from this analysis of the studies discussed in this chapter is that those writers who had the strongest relationship with WLC had received considerable support from their writing instructors as well as their content area instructors, and, again, developed a valuable connection with WLC over time, not quickly. Also notable is the depth gained by the move to longitudinal studies. A significant advantage of such studies is that, as noted in the previous paragraph, they allow researchers to look more closely at how teachers interact with students and the effects this has on students’ encounters with WLC. All of the authors cited are themselves writing teachers who had taught the participants in their studies. This allowed them to track, over time, how the participants employed strategies and support offered in their writing courses. The longitudinal approach also provided these teachers/ researchers the time and space necessary to talk in depth with the students’ content area teachers about their courses and their own interaction with their participants. This would seem to be a vital perspective to bear in mind as future studies are designed. On the other hand, the lack of quantitative research in this area is noteworthy. It would be helpful to gain quantitative insights into this application of writing.



Chapter 3.╇ Writing in content areas

Another important point emerging from this review is the focus on the English as second language (ESL) context. As noted earlier, it has been observed (Manchón & de Haan 2008) that writing research in foreign language contexts is far outweighed by ESL research, though that trend is beginning to change (e.g., see Manchón 2009). There is a very strong need to see how foreign language students use writing to navigate through other courses, though such opportunities may be limited due to the lack of situations in which these students can use foreign language writing beyond their foreign language courses, an exception being CLIL approaches (cf. Coyle & Baetens Beardsmore 2007; Ruiz de Zarobe & Jiménez-Catalán 2009). It also needs to be pointed out that the research thus far has concentrated on the U.S. context, for reasons discussed earlier by Foster and Russell (2002). And yet we know from their work and from Tynjala, Mason, and Lonka (2001) that the use of writing for learning purposes occurs beyond the U.S. and in some cases is part of the foundation of other educational systems, particularly at the secondary school level. Indeed, in these contexts writing is conceptualized as an integral part of the learning process, perhaps so much so that there may not appear to be a need to study how well it serves learning purposes. The assumption that it does may be too deeply embedded in these systems. It would be beneficial to learn more about how well it actually enhances learning. Finally, it is notable that so little attention has been paid to the relationship between computers and writing to learn. It seems safe to assume that in many countries students are commonly expected to utilize the Internet in various ways across courses, and this situation presumably alters the circumstances under which writing to learn will operate. Consequently, there is a need for more research that explores relationships between computer-based literacy and writing in the content areas. What we see on the whole in this review is that there is much to be learned about WLC, and that the relative handful of studies conducted thus far have demonstrated that this is an area worthy of further investigation. Important insights have been gained, but much of the picture has not yet been produced. Hopefully more L2 writing researchers will add to their research agendas this important and promising area of research in both ESL and foreign language contexts across the globe, and at various levels of educational systems. WLC, like LW and WLL (discussed in other chapters in this volume), offers too much potential for the development of L2 writing ability and the acquisition of content area knowledge to remain on what might be called the periphery of L2 writing research, as Ortega also explains in her chapter that closes this book.

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References Applebee, A. N. & Langer, J. A. 1984. Contexts for Learning to Write: Studies of Secondary School Instruction. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Belcher, D. & Hirvela, A. (eds). 2008. The Oral-literate Connection: Perspectives on L2 Speaking, Writing, and Other Media Interactions. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Brinton, D. M., Snow, M. A. & Wesche, M. B. 1989. Content-Based Language Instruction. Boston MA: Heinle & Heinle. Britton, J. 1983. Language and learning across the curriculum. In Forum: Essays on Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing, P. L. Stock (ed.), 221–224. Portsmouth NH: Boynton/ Cook. Coyle, D. & Baetens Beardsmore, H. (eds). 2007. Content and language integrated learning. Special issue of Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism 10(5). Foster, D. & Russell, D. R. (eds). 2002. Writing and Learning in Cross-national Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education. Urbana IL: NCTE & Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. European Commission. 2008. Multilingualism-content and anguage teaching. (March 20, 2011). Emig, J. 1977. Writing as a mode of learning. College Composition and Communication 28: 122–128. Herrington, A. J. 1981. Writing to learn: Writing across the disciplines. College English 43: 379–387. Herrington, A. J. & Curtis, M. 2000. Persons in Process: Four Stories of Writing and Personal Development in College. Urbana IL: NCTE. Hirvela, A. 2005. Computer-based reading and writing across the curriculum: Two case studies of L2 writers. Computers and Composition 22: 337–356. Kasper. L. F. 2000. Preface: Content-based college ESL instruction: An overview. In ContentBased College ESL Instruction, L. F. Kasper (ed.), vii–xiv. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Langer, J. A. 1986. Learning through writing: Study skills in the content areas. Journal of Reading 29: 400–406. Langer, J. A. & Applebee, A. N. 1987. How Writing Shapes Thinking: A Study of Teaching and Learning. Urbana IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Leki, I. 2007. Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development. New York NY: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Leki, I., Cumming, A. & Silva, T. 2008. A Synthesis of Research on Second Language Writing in English. New York NY: Routledge. Lyster, R. 2007. Learning and Teaching Languages through Content: A Counterbalanced Approach [Language Learning & Language Teaching 18]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Manchón, R. M. (ed.). 2009. Foreign Language Writing. Learning, Teaching and Research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Manchón, R. M. & de Haan, P. 2008. Writing in foreign language contexts: An introduction. Journal of Second Language Writing 17: 1–6. McGinley, W. & Tierney, R. J. 1989. Traversing the topical landscape: Reading and writing as ways of knowing. Written Communication 6: 243–269.



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National Commission on Writing. 2003. The Neglected “R”: The Need for a Writing Revolution. New York NY: The College Board. Newell, G. F. 1998. ‘How much are we the wiser?’: Continuity and change in writing and learning in the content areas. In The Reading-Writing Connection: Ninety-Seventh Yearbook of the National Society for the Study of Education, Part II, N. Nelson & R. C. Calfee (eds), 178–202. Chicago IL: University of Chicago Press. Newell, G. E. 2006. Writing to learn: How alternative theories of school writing account for student performance. In Handbook of Writing Research, C. A. MacArthur, S. Graham & J.€Fitzgerald (eds), 235–247. New York NY: The Guilford Press. Ruiz de Zarobe, Y. & Jiménez Catalán, R. 2009. Content and Language Integrated Learning. Evidence from Research in Europe. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Russell, D. R. 2002. Writing in the Academic Disciplines: A Curricular History, 2nd edn. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Schumacher, G. M. & Gradwohl Nash, J. 1991. Conceptualizing and measuring knowledge change due to writing. Research in the Teaching of English 25: 67–96. Smoke, T. 1994. Writing as a means of learning. College ESL 4: 1–11. Spack, R. 1997. The acquisition of academic literacy in a second language: A longitudinal study. Written Communication 14: 3–62. Sternglass, M. S. 1997. Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Tynjala, P., Mason, L. & Lonka, K. (eds). 2001. Writing as a Learning Tool: Integrating Theory and Practice. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Vacca, R. T. & Linek, W. M. 1992. Writing to learn. In Reading/Writing Connections: Learning from Research, J. W. Irwin & M. A. Doyle (eds), 145–159. Newark DE: International Reading Association. Weigle, S. 2002. Assessing Writing. Cambridge: CUP. Weissberg, R. 2006. Connecting Speaking & Writing in L2 Writing Instruction. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Widdowson, H. G. 1978. Teaching Language as Communication. Oxford: OUP.

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chapter 4

Writing to learn the language Issues in theory and research Rosa M. Manchón

University of Murcia, Spain

This chapter offers an overview of several strands of existing research addressing various aspects of L2 writing and SLA so as to be able to trace signs, both overtly provided by the authors or implicitly emerging from their arguments, of a shared interest in what I call the language learning potential of writing. I review theoretical frameworks informing this body of research, the most prominent themes investigated, and its main research methodology characteristics. Key findings of the studies reviewed are then synthesized and critically discussed from the perspective of the light they shed on the relationship between written output practice and second language development. The chapter concludes with a call for research into the writing-to-learn the language dimension of L2 writing.

As noted in the Introduction to this volume, we can look at “writing to learn” from various perspectives. The one adopted in the present chapter considers writing as a tool for language learning, which contrasts with the view of writing to learn as “a mode of discovery or negotiation” analyzed in Hirvela’s contribution (Chapter 3). The rationale behind the language learning potential of writing was neatly expressed by Cumming in the early 1990’s when he argued that “composition writing might function broadly as a psycholinguistic output condition wherein learners analyze and consolidate second language knowledge that they have previously (but not yet fully) acquired” (Cumming 1990:â•›483). He then added Composition writing elicits attention to form-meaning relations that may prompt learners to refine their linguistic expression – and hence their control over their linguistic knowledge – so that it is more accurately representative of their thoughts and of standard usage. This process appears to be facilitated by the natural disjuncture between written text and the mental processes of generating and assessing it.  (Cumming 1990:â•›483)

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Various positions on the issue have since been advanced (cf. Manchón in press; Manchón & Roca de Larios 2007; Ortega 2009), and numerous empirical studies have directly or indirectly shed light on the potential of writing for language development envisioned by Cumming. The result is that, as recently noted by Williams (2008), “it is increasingly apparent that the act of writing may […] promote general proficiency in ways that have not always been acknowledged” (p. 11). My goal is to review several strands of existing research addressing various aspects of L2 writing and SLA so as to be able to trace signs, both overtly provided by the authors or implicitly emerging from their arguments, of a shared interest in what I call the language learning potential (LLP) of writing. This move allows me to craft a new lens with which to envision a well defined space for a future research domain at the intersection between L2 writing and SLA, whose goal would be to investigate the writing-to-learn language dimension of L2 writing development and instruction. I shall do so by reviewing this body of knowledge in order to shed light on five issues: (i) the theoretical paradigms informing it, (ii) the most prominent themes investigated, (iii) the methods and research designs employed, (iv) the main research insights obtained, and, in view of the former, (v) the empirical questions to be included in future research agendas. The collected research includes individual and collaborative, pen-and-paper writing studies published between 1990 and 2010 that either explicitly claimed to be dealing with the functions of language output posited in the relevant SLA literature (see below), and/or have looked into issues of attention and noticing while engaged in individual and collaborative writing, and/or when processing feedback on one’s own writing. The rationale behind these inclusion criteria will become more evident as we progress through the chapter.

Main strands of research and theoretical frameworks informing them Table 1 represents a synthesis of the empirical research on the LLP of writing. As shown in the first column, two main groups of studies can be distinguished: Descriptive and Intervenionist studies, each one further subdivided into two subgroups. Collectively considered, Descriptive Studies have shed light on the manner in which the production of written output (both in individual and collaborative writing conditions) fosters a number of processes (understood in both cognitive and socio-cultural terms) deemed to be conducive to language development. In contrast, Interventionist Studies have explored the manner in which the L2 learner’ linguistic processing (mediated by various forms of experimental intervention) during individual and/or collaborative writing can exert (short-term) effects on learning.



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

As shown in the second main column of Table 1, the theoretical positions informing these two strands of research are cognitive and sociocultural in nature. Cognitive theoretical frameworks include the Focus on Form paradigm (cf. Doughty 2001; Doughty & Williams 1998), cognitively-oriented views of the role of interaction in promoting language development (cf. Gass & Mackey 2007), and two influential SLA hypotheses: the Noticing Hypothesis (cf. Schmidt 2001) and the Output Hypothesis (cf. Swain 1985, 1995). One common denominator of these paradigms is the role attributed to the process of attention. Thus, the main tenet of the Focus on Form (FonF) literature is that drawing the learner’s attention to language as an object while engaged in communication is beneficial for L2 development. Along the same lines, both the Noticing Hypothesis and the Output Hypothesis put special emphasis on the crucial role of attention in SLA, and on the need for learners to notice gaps in their L2 knowledge resources, as well as the gap between their language resources and the L2 rules, for SLA to proceed. Such noticing, according to the Output Hypothesis, is one of the functions of oral and written output. Finally, cognitively-oriented views on the role of interaction emphasize the opportunities for language learning that may derive from the attention to language generated though interaction among L2 learners in group- and pair-work. Being consistent with these various theoretical positions, Cognitively-oriented studies have explored the nature and/or effects (with or without experimental intervention) of the L2 learner’s attention to language (including grammar and, to a lesser extent, lexis), during the performance of writing tasks and activities and/or while processing the corrective feedback obtained on one’s own writing. A commonly employed operational definition of attention in this research is a unit of analysis known as “language related episodes” (LREs), a concept generally used in its original formulation to refer to those instances “in which students talk about language problems encountered while writing and (attempt to) solve them” (Swain & Lapkin 1995:â•›378). According to the information in Table 1, another substantial portion of research has been informed by sociocultural frameworks. Particularly influential have been some views on the effect of social interactions in the appropriation of linguistic knowledge by the individual, which are based on the premise that individual knowledge is socially co-constructed during collaborative problemsolving tasks (cf. Swain 2000, 2006). The potential learning effects of such collaborations are thought to be closely linked to the metatalk and reflection on and about language that results from collaborative problem solving, recently reconceptualized as “languaging” (Swain 2006). In this context, languaging is defined as “the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006:â•›98). As such, languaging is thought to be “part of what

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Strands of research

I.1. Descriptive processoriented studies*

I.2. Descriptive, collaborative writing, FonF studies**

I. Descriptive studies

• Input  Hypothesis • Output  Hypothesis • Noticing Hypothesis

• Focus on Form • Cognitive views of the role of interaction in SLA

• Input  Hypothesis • Output  Hypothesis

Cognitive

• Individual and collaborative writing: essay and dictogloss tasks (with or without process data – think aloud, retrospection, etc) • Participants: intermediate • Feedback: reformulation, various forms of feedback, models • Measures of learning: (i) performance on language tests (pre & post treatment) and (ii) features of texts (written before and after the experimental intervention)

• Sociocul• Role of (individual tural views and collaborative) of the role of written output pracinteraction & tice in processing collaboration subsequent incoming input and effects in SLA on learning

• Individual writing • Think-aloud • L2 writers varying in L2 proficiency and writing expertise • Composition writing • Measure of learning: None

Methods

• Collaborative writing (vs. individual writing) • Intermediate and advanced L2 learners • Meaning-based vs. language-based tasks (i.e. various forms of composition writing vs. written reconstruction of previously available language); or written vs. oral tasks • Unit of analysis: LREs • Measures of learning: None or performance on language tests

• Documentation of noticing and hypothesis testing activity while writing and possible learning outcomes • Language in focus: grammar & lexis

Main focus of research

• Sociocul• Attention to lantural views guage/languaging of the role of via collaborative interaction & writing and effects collaboration on learning in SLA • Language in focus: grammar

Socio-cultural

Theoretical frameworks informing research

Table 1.╇ An overview of research on learning to write the language

64 Rosa M. Manchón

Collaboration and language learning

Nature and effects of attention to

II.1. Feedback  studies***

II. Interventionist

language while writing

II.2. Input/output  studies****

studies

• Language in focus: grammar & lexis (Feedback studies) and grammar (Input/output studies) • Individual writing • Comparison of output and input conditions (input enhancement & input processing) • Language in focus: grammar • Intermediate? L2 learners • Writing: • Pre-test/treatment/post-test & experimental and quai-experimental designs • Messures of learning: performance on language tests (pre & post treatment)

**** Benati 2005; Izumi 2002; Izumi & Bigelow 2000; Izumi, Bigelow, Fujiwara & Fearnow 1999; Song & Suh 2008; Suzuki, Itagaki, Takagi & Watanabe 2009; Qin 2008.

*** Adams 2003; Bitchener 2008; Bitchener & Knoch 2008; Ellis et al. 2008; Hanaoka 2007; Lapkin, Swain & Smith 2002; Nassaji & Swain 2000; Qi & Lapkin 2001; Sachs & Polio 2007; Sheen 2010; Storch & Wigglesworth 2010; Suzuki 2008; Swain & Lapkin 2002; Tocalli-Beller & Swain 2005; Watanabe & Swain 2007.

** Adams 2006; Adams & Ross-Feldman 2008; Alegría de la Colina & García Mayo 2007; Eckerth 2008; Fortune 2005; Fortune & Thorp 2001; García Mayo 2002a, 2002b; Kuiken & Vedder 2002a, 2002b; Leeser 2004; Malmqvist 2005; Niu 2009; Reinders 2009; Storch 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2005, 2007, 2009; Storch & Wigglesworth 2007, 2009; Suzuki & Itagaki 2007, 2009; Suzuki, Itagaki, Takagi & Watanabe 2009; Swain 1998; Swain & Lapkin 1995, 1998; Watanabe & Swain 2009; Wigglesworth & Storch 2009.

* Cumming 1990; Swain & Lapkin 1995.

• Input  Hypothesis • Output  Hypothesis

Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language 65

66 Rosa M. Manchón

constitutes learning” given that it draws the learners’ attention to the languagerelated problems encountered while writing, and gives them “the tools to reason with, the solutions” (Swain 2006:â•›106; see also Swain et al. 2009). It is further argued that languaging and the metatalk fostered in collaborative writing tasks possess a reprocessing function – because “the knowledge building that learners have collectively accomplished becomes a tool for the further individual use of their second language” (Swain and Lapkin 2002:â•›254) – as well as a noticing function – because metatalk is thought to offer more favourable conditions for deeper levels of noticing as it fosters attentional processes at the level of understanding (Storch 2009). According to these tenets, the ultimate aim of the various socioculturallyoriented groups of studies in Table 1 is an attempt to shed light on the purported connection between the linguistic processing that results from collaboration and language learning.

Research foci and methodology Descriptive studies Descriptive Process-Oriented Studies include two pioneering investigations (Cumming 1990; Swain & Lapkin 1995) that delved into the potential for language learning of the problem-solving activity inherent to the act of writing, a research aim based on the assumption that “problems that arise while producing the second language can trigger cognitive processes that are involved in second language learning (Swain & Lapkin 1995:â•›371). Accordingly, the main aim of these studies was to document the L2 writers noticing activity and, to a lesser extent, hypothesis-testing, metalinguistic and monitoring activities while engaged in composition writing, as well as to shed light on the possible factors mediating such noticing activity. The rationale for this research endeavour was the recognition that, before any causal relationship between composition writing and language learning could be established, it was necessary to obtain “more precise descriptions […] of the metalinguistic thinking that second language learners use while they compose” (Cumming 1990:â•›485) so that these descriptions could be contrasted with relevant theoretical SLA positions. By doing so, it could indirectly be ascertained whether the cognitive processes involved in the descriptions were potentially conducive to language learning. From a methodological angle, and in agreement with their psycholinguistic orientation, these pioneering studies made use of think-aloud protocols provided by adolescent and adult L2 writers while engaged in the individual completion of



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

more and less cognitively-demanding composition writing tasks. The researchers provided detailed descriptions of the evidence of noticing processes in the protocol data as well as qualitative and quantitative analyses of the participants’ noticing processes as a function of learner variables (proficiency and writing expertise) and task variables (task complexity and stages of the writing process). These data were discussed from the perspective of the possible effects of the observed noticing activity (and related processes) on learning, although the researchers’ observations in this respect remained purely speculative (as they were careful to note) given the exploratory nature of the research. Surprisingly, however, and partly as a result of the scant attention paid to composition writing in subsequent research (see below), it is still an empirical question whether or not this type of writing can contribute to language development and, if so, what type of language development this can be, or which variables may mediate learning potentials. Descriptive, Collaborative-Writing, Interaction, and FonF Studies represent another line of research within Descriptive Studies. Four main issues have been addressed in this research, although it is important to mention that writing is in focal attention in only some of them. First, some scholars have explored the taskdependency of the L2 learner’s attention to language (grammar) while engaged in collaborative writing (cf. Alegría de la Colina & García Mayo 2007; Kuiken & Vedder 2002a; Fortune & Thorp 2001; García Mayo 2002a, b; Storch 1998a, b, 2001; Suzuki & Itagaki 2007), a research objective that is less related to the LLP of writing per se and, instead, it is more closely linked to the SLA-oriented pedagogical aim of finding out more about the type of tasks that are more effective in promoting L2 learners’ focus on form. Second, researchers have also investigated the nature of the linguistic processing and the various patterns of the interaction fostered by collaborative writing or by various types of tasks, as well as their possible effects on learning (cf. Eckerth 2008; Storch 2002a, b, 2005, 2007, 2009; Swain 1998; Swain & Lapkin 1995, 1998; Watanabe & Swain 2009). Third, the effect of individual vs. collaborative writing on writing processes and written products has gradually attracted some attention (cf. Kim 2008; Kuiken & Vedder 2002b; Malmqvist 2005; Reinders 2009; Storch 1999, 2005, 2007; Storch & Wigglesworth 2007; Wigglesworth & Storch 2009). Finally, task modality effects on FonF have been investigated (Adams 2006; Adams & Ross-Feldman 2008; Niu€2009). As for research methodology, this strand of research has investigated intermediate and, to a lesser extent, advanced adolescent and adult L2 learners. As shown in Table 1, the main research focus has been L2 grammar (but see Kim 2008; Leeser 2004; Malmqvist 2005; Wigglesworth & Storch 2009, for reference to attention to lexis), mainly English grammar, followed by studies of French (cf. Swain & Lapkin 1998, 2002; Swain, Lapkin, Knouzi & Brooks 2009; Watanabe &

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Swain 2007, 2009), German (Eckerth 2008; Malmkvist 2005), Korean (Kim 2008), and Spanish (Leeser 2004). In studies investigating the task-dependency of the participants’ focus on form, task type has been operationalized in terms of a continuum form more “meaning-based” to more “language-based” writing tasks. The former have included, for instance, composition and dictogloss tasks (in which writers jointly reconstruct a text previously read out to them), whereas the latter included controlled grammar-focused activities (such as cloze tests) and editing tasks. In any case, the bulk of research is on writing based on language produced by others rather than self-produced texts, an important issue to bear in mind when interpreting research findings. The studies that have explored the effect that the linguistic processing may have on acquisition have made use of a pretest/post test design (cf. Kim 2008; Kuiken & Vedder 2002b; Reinders 2009; Swain and Lakpin 1998 ) with the post test consisting of grammaticality judgement tests (Reinders 2009), knowledge of vocabulary measured by a 5-point scale (Kim 2008), or a tailor-made language test designed on the basis of the participants’ LREs generated while performing the writing task (cf. Eckerth 2008; Swain & Lapkin 1998).

Interventionist studies A central tenet of the original formulation of the Output Hypothesis (cf. Swain 1985, 1995) was that the noticing function associated with the production of challenging output entailed a consciousness-raising function that could result in prompting learners to (i) look for ways to fill their noticed gaps, and/or (ii) engage in more focused attention to incoming input. The two groups of Interventionist Studies included in Table 1 have shed light on the latter through the exploration of the role of individual or collaborative output practice in processing subsequent incoming input. A pre-test/treatment/post-test design has been the norm. Measures of learning include both performance on language tests (pre and post treatment), and/or features of the texts produced before and after the experimental intervention. Two subgroups of studies can be distinguished according to the nature of such treatment: Feedback Studies and Input/Output Studies. Feedback Studies are framed in both cognitive and sociocultural frameworks and have explored the manner in which providing learners with input/feedback and prompting them to process such input (either individually or collaboratively) has any effects on learning grammar and lexis. Accordingly, the participants in these studies (in all cases of an intermediate proficiency level) were asked to produce a text (including essay writing and dictogloss tasks), and they were then



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

provided with various types of input/feedback, including (i) reformulation of the participants’ original texts (cf. Adams 2003; Lapkin, Swain & Smith 2002; Qi & Lapkin 2001; Swain & Lapkin 2002; Tocalli-Beller & Swain 2005; Watanabe & Swain 2007); (ii) provision of models (Hanaoka 2007); (iii) provision of feedback on the students’ writing and reflection (languaging) on it (Suzuki 2008); (iv) engagement in tutorial sessions (Nassaji & Swain 2000); and (v) provision of more than one type of feedback, for instance, reformulation and editing/error correction (cf. Sachs & Polio 2007; Storch &Wigglesworth 2010), oral/written feedback or focused and/or unfocused feedback with or without metalinguistic explanations (Bitchener 2008; Bitchener & Knoch 2008; Ellis et al. 2008; Sheen 2007, 2010). As noted by Bitchener (2009) with respect to his own research, these are investigations of the way in which feedback can help mastery and control of partially acquired linguistic knowledge, rather than the way in which feedback can aid in the acquisition of new language. Input/Output Studies represent a cognitively-oriented strand whose aim is to shed light on the acquisition of new knowledge through the investigation of (i)€the way in which written output tasks (such as composition writing or dictogloss tasks) vs. a non-output task (for example, a reading comprehension task) may guide the learner’s attention to incoming input, provided after completion of the output or the non-output task; and (ii) the effects of such attention on grammar learning. Put it another way, these studies have looked into the potential of output practice for the processing of incoming input in the learning of grammar by comparing output learning conditions with input learning conditions, these input conditions including input enhancement, on the one hand, and input processing, on the other (cf. Benati 2005; Izumi 2002; Izumi & Bigelow 2000; Izumi, Bigelow, Fujiwara & Fearnow 1999; Qin 2008; Song & Suh 2008). The participants were of an intermediate L2 proficiency and the targeted grammatical areas include English relativization (Izumi 2002), English past simple tense (Benati 2005), past hypothetical and past counterfactual conditionals in English (Izumi & Bigelow 2000; Izumi, Bigelow, Fujiwara & Fearnow 1999; Song & Suh 2008), and simple English passive voice (Qin 2008). In addition, a more recent study by Suzuki, Itagaki, Takagi and Watanabe (2009) investigated low and high intermediate L2 learners and the focus was on the acquisition of both grammar (20 predetermined forms) and lexis.

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Main research findings I shall now synthesize the main findings of this research from the perspective of the light they shed on the relationship between written output practice and second language development.

Writing fosters a type of linguistic processing with potential learning effects The general conclusion to be drawn from the research reviewed is that writing€– especially collaborative writing – fosters a type of linguistic processing with potential learning effects. Furthermore, the conclusion needs to be qualified by the observation that such linguistic processing is more likely to take place in written than in spoken collaborative tasks, and is mediated by task- and writer-related factors. Both Descriptive and Interventionist Studies have provided evidence of learner’s engagement in the following learning processes during writing: (i) noticing and attentional focus on form processes; (ii) formulation of hypotheses about linguistic forms and functions; (iii) hypothesis testing via confirmation of one’s own production and via receiving corrective feedback on one’s own linguistic choices (including corrective feedback from peers in collaborative writing); (iv) generating and assessing linguistic options through the use of explicit and implicit knowledge and via cross-linguistic comparisons; and (v) metalinguistic reflection and languaging processes. In addition, research on modality effects (Adams 2006; Adams & RossÂ�Feldman 2008; Niu 2009; Ross-Feldman 2007) distinctively show that this linguistic processing is much more likely to take place in writing than in speaking, an issue of important theoretical and pedagogical implications. For instance, Niu (2009) investigated the effects of production modes on EFL learners’ FonF (operationalized in terms of LREs) and found striking quantitative and qualitative similarities and differences between the LREs of the pair performing the writing and the oral task. First, the written task included many more LREs that the oral task. Second, both modes focused the participants’ attention on similar lexical aspects, although there were quantitative differences across modalities. Interestingly, the participants were found to pay more attention to grammar in the writing task than in the oral task, and substantially much more attention to discourse features (including sentence structure, text connection, sentence connection, sentence length, and paragraphing) in the written mode. Finally, the study also found that the dialogue generated during writing resulted in more extensive discussions of the language issues attended to than the collaboration that took place while



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

performing the oral task. The researcher concluded that “task-inherent modes of production do impact upon learners’ focus on form in that collaborative writing tends to be able to draw learner attention to language forms more than oral communication alone” (p. 397). This was interpreted as the result of the more demanding nature of writing versus speaking, the greater availability of time in writing, and the fact that the writing task included both oral and written production, whereas the oral task only entailed speaking. In line with other researchers (cf. Adams & Ross-Feldman 2008; Storch 2001; Swain 1998; Swain & Lakpin 1998) it was also concluded that the combination of speaking and writing can be taken to be more powerful in drawing attention to language forms than the oral production mode alone and hence “provide more language learning opportunities or potentials” (p.€397), although the author is careful to note that “potentials do not equal actual learning” (p. 398). As mentioned above, the linguistic processing fostered by writing is mediated by task- and writer-related factors. Regarding task-related variables, the literature on collaborative writing has shown that while engaged in composition and dictogloss writing tasks (both being meaning-based tasks) students produced fewer LREs than when completing more language-based tasks (such as text reconstruction tasks), a finding that I have previously interpreted (Manchón, in press) as a question of how writers distribute their time on task among the different components of the composing process: the writers in collaborative writing studies appeared to need a substantial amount of their task time to agree on the meaning of their jointly written texts, or to plan text and procedures. As a consequence, less task time was available to focus on language. In this respect, Malmqvist (2005) reports that “a portion of the exchanges in all groups […] focused on how to organize the work, who should be the scribe, or how the task should be understood or carried out” (p. 136). The connection between time on task and degree of focus on form in collaborative writing has seldom been discussed in the literature on the benefits of collaboration for learning and, to my mind, is a crucial issue to be addressed in future research for both theoretical and pedagogical reasons. At a minimum, research in the field should shed light on whether or not, in the interest of time, the potential benefits for learning derived from collaborative writing outweigh those that derive from other pedagogical options. The linguistic processing that takes place during collaborative writing has also been found to be partially dependent on learner-related factors, (cf. Fortune 2005; Hanaoka 2007; Leeser 2004; Qi & Lapkin 2001; Storch & Wigglesworth 2010; Swain & Lapkin 1998), most notably the writers’ level of proficiency and their motivations, goals and beliefs. For instance, Leeser’s (2004) research has provided clear evidence of the mediating role played by the writer’s L2 proficiency in bringing about learning during collaborative writing. He found that the proficiency of

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each dyad member affected how much the writers in the study focused on form while writing, the types of forms they focused on, and how well they resolved the language problems they encountered. Along the same lines, Malmqvist (2005) stressed the mediating role played by personality and interpersonal dynamics in collaborative writing. Individual differences have also been found to play a role in the processing of feedback on one’s own writing. In their recent study on the issue, Storch and Wigglesworth (2010) present telling findings on the influence of affective factors, such as the learner’s attitudes, beliefs and goals. They noted that these affective factors appeared to influence not only the type of strategies their advanced language learners adopted when processing the feedback received, but also, and rather importantly “their willingness to accept the feedback and their likelihood of retaining it” (p. 329).This led them to conclude that “whether and which type of feedback is effective depend on a complex and dynamic interaction of linguistic and affective factors” (p. 329).

Aspects of language attended to while writing and task mediating factors The studies included in Table 1 have also shed light on which aspects of language L2 learners focus their attention on while writing. Again, task-related and learner-related factors appear to play a mediating role. Task-related factors include task type, on the one hand, and stage of the writing process, on the other. LearnerÂ�related factors include L2 proficiency, together with writers’ goals, beliefs and motivations. Taking together the findings from studies that have included different task types, and the descriptions of LREs in collaborative writing (cf. García Mayo 2002a, 2002b; Kuiken & Vedder 2002a, 2002b; Storch 1998a, 1998b, 1999, 2002a, 2002b, 2005; Swain & Lapkin 1998), it can be concluded that the more open the task, the more focus on lexis and the less attention paid to grammar, although this is mediated by proficiency. Thus, the closer we get to free and guided writing, the more empirical evidence there is on attention to lexis (and the less attention to grammar). Conversely, the more controlled and grammar-oriented writing tasks and activities are, the more participants limited their noticing and attentional processes, meta-talk and languaging to grammar. These findings apply to both individual and collaborative writing and many of the most revealing insights have been obtained in studies that present quantitative and/or qualitative analyses of the learners’ processing activity while writing through the analysis of protocol data or of LREs. Of theoretical and pedagogical interest is the finding that when it comes to grammar, there is no guarantee that students’/writers’ attentional processes will



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

match those intended by the researcher (cf. Eckerth 2008; Leeser 2004; Storch 2009; Swain 1998). Commenting on this issue, Eckerth (2008) stresses the “catalysing effect” (p. 135) of certain tasks to stimulate learning beyond the requirements of the task itself and he makes an interesting observation regarding the long-term effects on these attentional processes in learning. He wonders whether “learning gains based on the discussion of non-targeted L2 issues are more stable in the long term than learning gains based on L2 issues focused on by the task. As non-targeted L2 issues reflect the learners’ alertness towards their individual learning problems, they might be of potential acquisitional potential” (p. 133), an issue worth investigating in the future. In addition to the nature of the task, the stage of the writing process is another task-related variable that appears to mediate the language level attended to. In their study of individual, composition writing, Swain and Lakpin (1995) found that their participants paid more attention to lexis during the drafting stage, whereas grammar was in more focal attention during the editing phase of composing. The researchers also observed some proficiency effects in the amount of attention paid to grammar during the editing phase. Attention to grammar increased with proficiency, which, interestingly, Leeser (2004) and Malmqvist (2005) also found to be the case in collaborative writing. Nevertheless, these findings should be considered suggestive until confirmed by further research.

The connection between writing and L2 learning We have both speculative assertions about the possible connections between writing and L2 development, as well as evidence of such connection in studies that have included actual measures of learning. Thus, some studies have speculated about the effect of different cognitive processes on learning while writing, either individually or collaboratively. Regarding individual writing, Cumming (1990) and Swain and Lapkin (1995) argued that the problem-solving nature inherent to the act of composing could potentially contribute to consolidating and increasing control over one’s linguistic knowledge, as well as to generating new linguistic knowledge. The purported benefits of collaborative writing for both expanding and consolidating linguistic knowledge have also been suggested (cf. Malmqvist 2005; Storch & Wigglesworth 2007; Swain 1998; Swain & Lapkin 1998; Watanabe & Swain 2009; Wigglesworth & Storch 2009). More robust empirical support comes from studies that have included measures of learning. Recall that these were either performance on language tests (usually in pre-test/post-test design studies) or characteristics of the texts written before and after some sort of experimental intervention. For convenience, these findings

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can be divided into those that apply to the learning potential associated with writing, on the one hand, and those that apply to the language learning that may derive from processing feedback (especially corrective feedback), on the other. Regarding writing, it can be safely concluded that learning outcomes crucially depend on the depth of processing that takes place while engaged in text-generation processes. Two sorts of evidence can be adduced. On the one hand, various studies (cf. Fortune & Thorp 2001; Kuiken & Vedder 2002b; Qi & Lapkin 2001; Sachs & Polio 2007; Storch 2009) have distinguished between more and less elaborate or sophisticated noticing processes as manifested in LREs, such as simple vs. elaborate noticing (Kuiken & Vedder 2002b), perfunctory vs. substantive noticing (Qi & Lapkin 2001), or weighty and light LREs (Fortune & Thorp 2001). These dichotomies represent varying degrees of engagement with language with or without a metalinguistic component and the general finding is that depth of processing represented by the addition of the metalinguistic component results in greater (short term) learning gains. Evidence for the importance of depth of processing also comes from studies that have compared input and output learning conditions (cf. Izumi 2002; Izumi & Bigelow 2000; Izumi et al. 1999). The general finding is that the greater gains in the learning of discrete grammatical forms observed in the output condition could be attributed to the iterative process of successive waves of input and output students had to deal with, as well as to the deeper processing engaged in by the participants in the output condition. Regarding the latter, Izumi has argued that “the greater learning evidenced by the output subjects suggests that output triggered deeper and more elaborate processing of the form, which led them to establish a more durable memory trace” (Izumi 2002:â•›570). As far as the processing of feedback is concerned, there is evidence to suggest that the possible connection between feedback and learning appears to be influenced by two variables. One is the degree of explicitness of the feedback received, which Sheen (2010:â•›226) considers the “pivotal factor” in making feedback beneficial for learners. The second variable is, once again, depth of processing of the feedback received. It is agreed that the outcome of the learner’s processing of feedback is dependent upon whether or not learners engage in deeper processing than just noticing differences between their own writing and the input they receive on it at the level of simple detection. For instance, in a reformulation study, Adams (2003) analyzed Spanish FL learners’ noticing processes while comparing their own texts with a reformulated version in two different conditions: with or without stimulated recall on the participants’ noticing activity. She reports that the deeper processing fostered by the meta-reflection in the stimulated recall condition resulted in more intake and more learning. Similarly, Bitchener (2008) found that the provision of feedback with either oral or written metalinguistic



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

explanations resulted in greater learning gains than feedback that did not engage learners’ attention in this further processing (see also Sheen 2010; and Bitchener & Knoch 2008 for similar findings). These findings confirm previous tenets and findings in the SLA literature on the crucial role played by awareness at the level of “understanding” (vs. awareness at the level of “detection”) for subsequent input processing and language development (cf. Leow 2000; Robinson 1995; Rosa & O’Neill 1999; Schmidt 2001; Tomlin & Villa 1994).

Conclusions and implications for the future research agenda The body of knowledge reviewed in the preceding sections allow us to support William’s contention that “it is increasingly apparent that the act of writing may also promote general proficiency in ways that have not always been acknowledged” (Williams 2008:â•›11). To start with, research evidence exists on the role that written production (distinctively more than oral production, and clearly more too than input learning conditions) can have in engaging learners in various learning processes. The empirical evidence also points to a short-term impact of the linguistic processing associated with both the production of written output and the processing of corrective feedback on learning, particularly regarding the acquisition of discrete grammatical forms in English. In addition, research findings point to the mediating role played by various learner-related variables (language proficiency and a whole range of affective and motivational individual differences) and task-related variables (time on task, stage of the writing process, and form- vs. meaning-oriented nature of the task) in fostering language development through€writing. Despite the progress made, there is ample opportunity for future research. A crucial item to be investigated is the very concept of “learning” used in the field, particularly concerning the often expressed and somewhat problematic equation between observed noticing or focus on form processes and language learning. As recently noted by Reinders (2009), “successful performance on a classroom activity is […] not necessarily a good predictor of ultimate acquisition” (p. 219). Similarly, Leeser (2004) notes that “LREs represent learning in progress” (pp. 72–73). In recognition of these issues, some researchers distinguish between “uptake” and “learning” (cf. Manchón 2009), “uptake” and “acquisition” (Reinders 2009), or “uptake” and “retention” (Storch & Wiggesworth 2010). In this respect, future research in the field would certainly benefit from Sachs and Polio’s (2007) observations and suggestions regarding the manner in which language development may be conceptualized and operationalized in empirical research. Following Norris and Ortega (2003), these scholars remind us that it might be relevant to view L2

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acquisition as consisting of “gradual and non-linear changes in both linguistic and metalinguistic behaviour”, thus including not only “the appropriate use of linguistic forms but also, for example, the constructs of emergence, detection, restructuring, and awareness” (Sachs & Polio 2007:â•›75). Following from here, Sachs and Polio contend that “a range of psycholinguistic processes might be seen as constituting steps towards L2 development” (p. 75). Future studies will have to shed further light on the manner in which the engagement in certain writing tasks and activities may contribute to this range of psycholinguistic learning processes. Equally relevant will be the investigation of which actions (if any) are implemented by learners when they notice gaps and holes during their text-generation activity. The Output Hypothesis predicted that such noticing would prompt learners to engage in actions aimed at filling such gaps, as well as to pay more focused attention to incoming input. To my knowledge, these are only partially tested assumptions as far as the production of written output is concerned. In addition to finer grained analyses of the learning resulting from the production of written output, another important area of concern for future research relates to the benefits that may derive from expanding the data base. As mentioned in previous sections, the bulk of research is not on self-produced writing, but rather on controlled pedagogic tasks in which students were asked to reprocess language previously produced by others. Although this research might shed light on various SLA lines of research (such TBLL or FonF), it is still an empirical question whether or not the sustained engagement with complex meaning-making composition tasks can bring about learning, what type of learning this might be along the continuum mentioned above, or what variables may mediate potential learning outcomes. This is an unfortunate state of affairs given that ultimately not much progress seems to have been made with respect to the pioneering attempts in this direction by Cumming (1990) or Swain and Lapkin (1995) in the early 1990s. The benefits that closer investigation of composition writing may bring to advancing conversations in the field are also related to another crucial issue addressed in research: the learning potential of individual versus collaborative writing. Most of the available research has focused on collaborative writing, and there is no doubt that these studies have been very illuminating regarding the effects of collaboration on learning. However, my argument would be that, given that many forms of writing are intrinsically an individual enterprise, research findings on collaborative writing should not be taken to represent potential learning benefits of writing per se and even less of all forms of writing. In addition, collaborative writing may not serve everyone’s needs in producing a text, nor may it be the best way to promote learning through writing when it comes to complex writing tasks.



Chapter 4.╇ Writing to learn the language

This is a point well argued by Weissberg (2008) in his critique of the blind application of sociocultural views of learning to writing (see also Leki 2001). He neatly put it by claiming that for many writers “there is a time for the talking to cease and the work of writing to begin” (p. 40). Much more research is needed before we can ascertain the learning potential afforded by such individual writing. Future research should also focus on the provision and processing of feedback. I have argued elsewhere (Manchón 2009, in press) that the crucial concern in the writing-to-learn research should be “feedback for acquisition” and not so much “feedback for accuracy”. In this respect, the available research on the possible impact of corrective feedback on acquisition needs to be expanded in various directions. First, the investigation of lexis would be crucial, if only because of the paramount role played by lexical access, retrieval and choice in writing (see Manchón, Roca de Larios & Murphy 2007). Second, more complex grammatical rules from those so far investigated need to be researched, as recently noted by Xu (2009) and Ferris (2010). These scholars have argued that research designs should not be limited to easily treatable grammatical errors and that what now demands our attention should not be whether error correction results in learning gains when focused on a limited number or errors related to a restricted range of linguistic forms, but rather whether the purported benefits of corrective feedback apply to other more complex, less well defined target features and structures, or whether corrective feedback is the quickest, most economic and most efficient pedagogical option when it comes to certain grammatical structures. As argued by Ferris (2010) “it is not clear whether the findings of these types of studies will be applicable if more errors are treated at the same time, if more complex structures are addressed, and if teachers opt, in the interest of time, energy, and limited expertise, for less explicit feedback methods” (p. 193). Finally, future research efforts must be devoted to the exploration of the LLP of writing in a wider range of educational contexts and proficiency levels, as well as to the investigation of long-term effects on learning: the research agenda needs to make room for the longitudinal investigation of the very nature of, and the variables mediating, the language learning potential of written output practice, including both the act of writing and the processing of feedback on one’s own writing. Such research should prove valuable in the fields of both writing research and second language acquisition, thus serving as a theoretical and pedagogical interface between these two fields of inquiry.

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Acknowledgements The synthesis presented in this chapter is part of a research project supported by a research grant from the Fundación Séneca, Murcia Regional Government Agency for Science and Technology (Research Grant 11942/PHCS/09). I would like to thank Lourdes Ortega and Julio Roca de Larios for their insightful suggestions for improvement of this chapter.

References Adams, R. 2003. L2 output, reformulation, and noticing: Implications for interlanguage development. Language Teaching Research 7(3): 347–376. Adams, R. 2006. L2 tasks and orientation to form: A role for modality? ITL: International Journal of Applied Linguistics 152: 7–34. Adams, R. & Ross-Feldman, L. 2008. Does writing influence learner attention to form? In The Oral-literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 243–266. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Alegría de la Colina, A. & García Mayo, M. P. 2007. Attention to form across collaborative tasks by low-proficiency learners in an EFL setting. In Investigating Tasks in Foreign Language Learning, M. P. García Mayo (ed.), 91–116. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Benati, A. 2005. The effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaningoutput instruction on the acquisition of the English past simple tense. Language Teaching Research 9(1): 67–93. Bitchener, J. 2008. Evidence in support of written corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing 17(2): 102–118. Bitchener, J. 2009. Measuring the effectiveness of written corrective feedback: A response to “Overgeneralization from a narrow focus: A response to Bitchener (2008)”. Journal of Second Language Writing 18(4): 276–279. Bitchener, J. & Knoch, U. 2008. The value of written corrective feedback in migrant and international students. Language Teaching Research 12: 409–431. Cumming, A. 1990. Metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. Written Communication 7(4): 482–511. Doughty, C. 2001. Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, P. Robinson (ed.), 206–257. Cambridge: CUP. Doughty, C. & Williams, J. (eds). 1998. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition. Cambridge: CUP. Eckerth, J. 2008. Investigating consciousness-raising task: Pedagogically targeted and non-targeted learning gains. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 18(2): 119–145. Ellis, R., Shenn, Y., Murakami, M. & Takashima, H. 2008. The effects if focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in an English as a foreign language context. System 36: 353–371. Ferris, D. 2010. Second language writing research and written corrective feedback in SLA. Intersections and practical applications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 181–201.



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Fortune, A. 2005. Learners’ use of metalanguage in collaborative form-focused L2 output tasks. Language Awareness 14: 21–38. Fortune, A. & Thorp, D. 2001. Knotted and entangled: New light on the identification, classification and value of language related episodes in collaborative output tasks. Language Awareness 10: 143–160. García Mayo, M. P. 2002a. The effectiveness of two form-focused tasks in advanced EFL pedagogy. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 12(2): 156–175. García Mayo, M. P. 2002b. Interaction in advanced EFL pedagogy: A comparison of form-focused activities. International Journal of Educational Research 37: 323–341. Gass, S. & Mackey, A. 2007. Input, interaction and output in second language acquisition. In Theories in Second Language Acquisition, B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds), 175–199. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Hanaoka, O. 2007. Output, noticing, and learning: An investigation into the role of spontaneous attention to form in a four-stage writing task. Language Teaching Research 11(4): 459–479. Izumi, S. 2002. Output, input enhancement, and the noticing hypothesis: An experimental study of ESL relativization. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24: 541–577. Izumi, S. & Bigelow, M. 2000. Does output promote noticing and second language acquisition? TESOL Quarterly 34(2): 239–278. Izumi, S., Bigelow, M., Fujiwara, M. & Fearnow, S. 1999. Testing the output hypothesis: Effects of output on noticing and second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21: 421–452. Kim, Y. 2008. The contribution collaborative and individual tasks to the acquisition of L2 vocabulary. The Modern Language Journal 92: 114–130. Kuiken, F. & Vedder, I. 2002a. Collaborative writing in L2: The effect of group interaction on text quality. In New Directions for Research in L2 Writing, S. Ransdell & M. Barbier (eds), 169–188. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kuiken, F. & Vedder, I. 2002b. The effect of interaction in acquiring the grammar of a second language. International Journal of Educational Research 37: 343–358. Lapkin, S., Swain, M. & Smith, M. 2002. Reformulation and the learning of French pronominal verbs in a Canadian French immersion context. The Modern Language Journal 86(4): 485–507. Leeser, M. J. 2004. Learner proficiency and focus on form during collaborative dialogue. Language Teaching Research 8(1): 55–81. Leki, I. 2001. ‘A narrow thinking system’: Non-native English-speaking students in group projects across the curriculum. TESOL Quarterly 35(1): 39–67. Leow, R. P. 2000. A study of the role of awareness in foreign language behavior. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 22: 557–584. Malmqvist, A. 2005. How does group discussion in reconstruction tasks affect written language output? Language Awareness 14 (2–3): 128–141. Manchón, R. M. 2009. The missing piece of the puzzle: The contribution of L2 writing research to current SLA theorizing. Paper given at the SSLW 2009, Arizona State University. Manchón, R. M. In press. The language learning potential of writing in foreign language contexts. Lessons from research. In Foreign Language Writing. Research Insights, M. Reichelt & T. Chimasko (eds). West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press.

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Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language contexts. In The Intercultural Speaker. Using and Acquiring English in Instructed Language Contexts, E.€Alcón & P. Safont (eds), 101–121. Dordrecht: Springer. Manchón, R. M., Roca de Larios, J. & Murphy, L. 2007. Lexical retrieval processes and strategies in second language writing: A synthesis of empirical research. International Journal of English Studies 7(4): 147–172. Nassaji, H. & Swain, M. 2000. A Vygotskian perspective on corrective feedback in L2: The effect of random versus negotiated help on the learning of English articles. Language Awareness 9(1): 34–51. Niu, R. 2009. Effect of task-inherent production modes on EFL learners’ focus on form. Language Awareness 18(3–4): 384–402. Norris, J. & Ortega, L. 2003. Defining and measuring L2 acquisition. In The Handbook of Second Language Acquisition, C. Doughty & M. H. Long (eds), 717–761. Oxford: Blackwell. Ortega, L. 2009. Studying writing across EFL contexts: Looking back and moving forward. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 232–255. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Qi, D. S. & Lapkin, S. 2001. Exploring the role of noticing in a three-stage second language writing task. Journal of Second Language Writing 10(4): 277–303. Qin, J. 2008. The effects of processing instruction and dictogloss tasks on the acquisition of the English passive voice. Language Teaching Research 12(1): 61–82. Reinders, H. 2009. Learner uptake and acquisition in three grammar-oriented production activities. Language Teaching Research 13(2): 201–222. Robinson, P. 1995. Attention, memory and the ‘noticing’ hypothesis. Language Learning 45: 283–331. Rosa, E. & O’Neill, M. 1999. Explicitness, intake, and the issue of awareness. Another piece of the puzzle. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 21: 511–556. Sachs, R. & Polio, C. 2007. Learners’ uses of two types of written feedback on an L2 writing revision task. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 29: 67–100. Schmidt, R. 2001. Attention. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, P. Robinson (ed.), 3–32. Cambridge: CUP. Sheen, Y. 2007. The effect of focused written corrective feedback and language aptitude on ESL learners’ acquisition of articles. TESOL Quarterly 41: 255–283. Sheen, Y. 2010. Differential effects of oral and written corrective feedback in the ESL classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 203–234. Song, M. & Suh, B.-R. 2008. The effects of output task types on noticing and learning of the English past counterfactual conditional. System 36: 295–312. Storch, N. 1998a. Comparing second language learners’ attention to form across tasks. Language Awareness 7(4): 176–191. Storch, N. 1998b. A classroom-based study: Insights from a collaborative test reconstruction task. ELT Journal 52(4): 291–300. Storch, N. 1999. Are two heads better than one? Pair work and grammatical accuracy. System 27: 363–374. Storch, N. 2001. Comparing ESL learners’ attention to grammar on three different classroom tasks. RELC Journal 32(2): 104–124. Storch, N. 2002a. Relationships formed in dyadic interaction and opportunity for learning. International Journal of Educational Research 37: 305–322. Storch, N. 2002b. Patterns of interaction in ESL pair work. Language Learning 52(1): 119–158.



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Storch, N. 2005. Collaborative writing: product, process, and students’ reflections. Journal of Second Language Writing 14: 153–173. Storch, N. 2007. Investigating the merits of pair work on a text editing task in ESL classes. Language Teaching Research 11(2): 143–159. Storch, N. 2009. Metatalk in a pair work activity: Level of engagement and implications for language development. Language Awareness 17(2): 95–114. Storch, N. & Wigglesworth, G. 2007. Writing tasks: The effect of collaboration. In Investigating Tasks in Foreign Language Learning, M. P. García Mayo (ed.), 157–177. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Storch, N. & Wigglesworth, G. 2010. Learners’ processing, uptake, and retention of corrective feedback on writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 303–334. Suzuki, W. 2008. The effect of written languaging combined with feedback on second language writing. Paper presented at the AAAL 2008 Annual Conference, Washington, DC, March. Suzuki, W. & Itagaki, N. 2007. Learner metalinguistic reflections following output-oriented and reflective activities. Language Awareness 16(2): 131–146. Suzuki, W. & Itagaki, N. 2009. Languaging in grammar exercises by Japanese EFL learners of differing proficiency. System 37: 217–225. Suzuki, W., Itagaki, N., Takagi, T. & Watanabe, T. 2009. The effect of output processing on subsequent input processing: A free recall study. Working Papers in TESOL and Applied Linguistics 9(1): 1–6. Swain, M. 1985. Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In Input in Second Language Acquisition, S. Gass & C. Madden (eds), 235–153. Rowley MA: Newbury House. Swain M. 1995. Three functions of output in second language learning. In Applied Linguistics. Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson, G. Cook & B. Seidlhofer (eds), 125–144. Oxford: OUP. Swain, M. 1998. Focus on form through conscious reflection. Focus on Form in Classroom Second Language Acquisition, C. Doughty & J. Williams (eds), 64–81. Cambridge: CUP. Swain, M. 2000. The output hypotheses and beyond: Mediating acquisition through collaborative dialogue. In Sociocultural Theory and Second Language Learning, J. Lantolf (ed.), 97–114. Oxford: OUP. Swain, M. 2005. The output hypothesis: Theory and research. In Handbook of Research in Second Language Teaching and Learning, E. Hinkel (ed.), 471–181. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Swain, M. 2006. Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced second language proficiency. In Advanced Language Learning. The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, H. Byrnes (ed.), 95–108. London: Continuum. Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. 1995. Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step toward second language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391. Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. 1998. Interaction and second language learning: Two adolescent French immersion students working together. The Modern Language Journal 82(3): 329–337. Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. 2002. Talking it through: Two French immersion learners’ response to reformulation. International Journal of Educational Research 37: 85–304. Swain, M., Lapkin, S., Knouzi, I., Suzuki, W. & Brooks, L. 2009. Languaging: University students learn the grammatical concept of voice in French. The Modern Language Journal 3(1): 5–29.

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Tocalli-Beller, A. & Swain, M. 2005. Reformulation: The cognitive conflict and L2 learning it generates. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 15(1): 5–28. Tomlin, R. S. & Villa, V. 1994. Attention in cognitive science and second language acquisition. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 16: 183–203. Watanabe, Y. & Swain, M. 2007. Effect of proficiency differences and patterns of pair interaction on second language learning: Collaborative dialogue between adult ESL learners. Language Teaching Research 11(2): 121–142. Watanabe, Y. & Swain, M. 2009. Perception of learner proficiency: Its impact on the interaction between an ESL learner and her higher and lower proficiency partners. Language Awareness 17(2): 115–130. Weissberg, R. 2008. Critiquing the Vygotskian approach to L2 literacy. In The Oral-Literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 26–45. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Wigglesworth, G. & Storch, N. 2009. Pair versus individual writing: Effects of fluency, complexity and accuracy. Language Testing 26(3): 45–466. Williams, J. 2008. The speaking-writing connection in second language and academic literacy development. In The Oral-Literate Connection, D. Belcher & A. Hirvela (eds), 10–25. Ann Arbor MI: The University of Michigan Press. Xu, C. 2009. Overgeneralization from a narrow focus: A response to Ellis et al. (2008) and Bitchener (2008). Journal of Second Language Writing 18(4): 270–275.

part ii

Learning-to-write and writing-to-learn Research insights

chapter 5

Learning to write in a second language Multilingual graduates and undergraduates expanding genre repertories Ilona Leki

University of Tennessee

This chapter reports on empirical research intended to gauge the type, extent, and source of genre knowledge of international students newly arrived at an English medium university and to trace these students’ reliance on and evolving assumptions about those genres and about the constraints and affordances of the novel genres they face. Data for the study came from surveys and text-based interviews. Results suggest that English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students have experience with and understanding of a wide range of genres in English and are able to adapt to new genre demands flexibly. Key issues include how and what knowledge is transferred, or not, to these new settings and how learning to write intersects with writing to learn.

Introduction This chapter focuses on learning to write in an additional language. Learning to write in new settings is here conceptualized as the students’ opportunity to use writing to learn (or recognize) just how much of their previous experience and instruction in writing they themselves are willing or able to transfer to, and transform in response to, a new setting. Research from the 1990s regularly suggested that a great many international students studying at tertiary institutions in the U.S. had had little or no previous experience with sustained writing, that is, beyond the sentence level (see, for example, Dong 1998; Leki 1995). Perhaps for this reason these students were often referred to as novice writers. But the landscape has changed dramatically since those years (see Leki 2002). Interest in offering writing instruction in both native and second/foreign languages has spurred the development of new writing courses, writing centers, and, less happily, writing exams in secondary and

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tertiary institutions around the world. Moreover, the definition itself of literacy has expanded to include a multitude of genres, not always academic and often multimedia, which are now also assumed to impact multilingual students’ academic literacy (New London Group 1996; Norton & Vanderheyden 2004; Street 1995). “Novice writers” no longer seems an appropriate designation for multilingual university level students. The intervening years have also seen important publications describing the new writing programs, courses, and requirements in academic settings in many countries (see, for example, Foster & Russell 2002; Reichelt 2003, 2005; You 2004). These programs attest to the growing importance of writing instruction in educational institutions world wide. But student uptake of writing instruction, that is, the declarative and procedural knowledge that multilingual students bring with them to new English L2 academic literacy contexts, may not always reflect instructional goals set by the previous institutions the students have passed through (Cumming 2006). Thus, in practice, it is not possible to know from these published descriptions of institutional goals and procedures the range of genre knowledge actually available to these students to draw on as they enter new literacy settings. In addition, studies by Sasaki (2009) and Rinnert and Kobayashi (2009) show how students’ past writing experiences and instruction differentially influenced their perceptions of and attitudes toward writing, which, in turn, influenced their willingness and ability to utilize and/or internalize textual features they had been exposed to. Rinnert and Kobayashi report that students who viewed writing in L1 and L2 as similar apparently felt freer to use similar rhetorical structures in both; this was not the case for those students who perceived writing in L1 and L2 as embodying different features. In Sasaki’s (2009) study, those students who were able to create for themselves “L2-related imagined communities” based on earlier study abroad experiences were able years later to tap into their sense of those readers to motivate their L2 writing and consequently improve their L2 writing proficiency. Furthermore, as L2 learners are increasingly viewed as multicompetent (Cook 2002), researchers have come to emphasize writer agency in the selection of text features from among those made available in each language and perceived as useful. Thus learning to write may entail for individuals the recognition of just how much or how little they feel comfortable drawing from their past writing experiences and consequently how much or little they are willing to bring to new experiences and demands. To some degree contrastive rhetoric studies also attempted to get at students’ uptake of prior or background literacy knowledge by analyzing their writing as exemplifying specific culturally induced rhetorical preferences. But contrastive rhetoric analyses of student writing tended to view that prior knowledge as



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

something to be suppressed or overcome in new L2 writing environments rather than as a resource. Neither contrastive rhetoric studies nor studies of institutional academic writing instruction account for the many and varied interactions with text that students experience in their lives as they encounter and must negotiate new literacy and genre demands, drawing on previous literacy experiences and adjudicating between those past experiences and the present requirements. Case study research (e.g., Johns 1991; Leki 1999; Spack 1997) has usefully detailed previous literacy experiences of multilingual students. But these reports on individual students are necessarily selective and fragmentary since they serve to contextualize the case study writers’ current experiences rather than attempting to create a more macro inventory of genre familiarity on which multilingual writers lean in confronting new genre tasks. A search of published material turned up only one reference to a study (a locally published online report, O’Donnell 2004) systematically asking students at the beginning of a writing course what genres they were already familiar with. Thus, no detailed, systematic account of the influence of these students’ previous encounters with academic literacy appears to exist. Yet past literacy knowledge is critical to current writing task representation since writers need to be able to “draw on elements from a range of schemes and options” (Allen 2004:â•›6) and are reported to draw freely on all the knowledge available to them from any of their languages (García 2009) in responding to new literacy demands. Given that humans typically turn to similar past experiences in determining how to deal with new experiences, the central question of this study was the role of writing experience (including instruction) in the academic literacy development of multilingual students. The research reported here thus aimed at delineating more precisely the reservoirs from which L2 writers draw as they cross language and institutional borders and encounter unfamiliar learn-to-write demands. Specifically, it is assumed here that previous genre knowledge plays some role in developing new genre knowledge, even if the new genre is an entirely different type. The “antecedent genres” (Devitt 2004) that constitute writers’ previous genre knowledge are or can be important starting points in raising the issue of transfer, long a concern for language scholars and lately of interest to L1 English writing researchers in the US (e.g., Smit 2004). Yet transfer of learning from previous genre instruction has been shown to be difficult to accomplish (James 2006, 2008, 2009). It is probably an instance of what psychologists call far transfer (Detterman 1993). Far transfer is the transfer of learning from one situation to another that is or is perceived by the learner to be substantially dissimilar. Despite the apparent difficulty of transfer of genre knowledge, the hope and expectation of writing instruction continues that what is learned about antecedent genres will be available at least in part in other contexts.

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The research reported in this chapter was thus intended to gauge the extent and variety of genre knowledge international students bring with them as they begin course work at an English medium university. A basic assumption of the research was that these writers’ previous genre experiences both in L1 and L2 would in fact influence how they approached and constructed texts in this new context. As self-report research, this study aimed to capture the writers’ sense of how learning to write (or being confronted with new writing tasks) occasions a special variety of writing-to-learn, that is, how it influences these writers’ shifting, dynamic sense of how much and what previous genre knowledge they deem usable in their new English dominant university setting. Genre knowledge here means what these students know about how to approach and carry out writing tasks both in their first languages and in English. The research questions were: 1. What genres are multilingual writers newly matriculated at a US university already familiar with? 2. Where did this knowledge come from? 3. What do these multilingual writers know about the genres they are familiar with? That is, what do the genres they are familiar with look like to them? 4. How do these students anticipate that their prior genre knowledge will inform the writing required in their new university settings? 5. What kinds of changes did the writers note in their perception of writing in English?

Method Context and participants The site for this study was a large state university where international students make up about 4% of the total enrollment of about 27,000. A paper TOEFL score of 527 is required for admission and most admitted students whose strongest/first language is not English are required to take an on-site placement exam intended to determine whether they need further language or academic literacy support. The exam includes a writing task which is allotted one hour and is based on a reading passage. In evaluating the writing, raters look primarily for fluency in terms of the writers’ ability to control the message and express ideas with flexibility, ease, and linguistic range. On the basis of the exam results, both graduates and undergraduates may be required to complete a credit-bearing academic English course which focuses on writing, reading, and a variety of other kinds of skills that support literacy (for example, dictionary and library use).



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

Table 1.╇ Students surveyed Undergraduate students Graduate students Total

Females

Males

Total

18 13 31

12 41 53

30 54 84

Table 2.╇ Regions of origin and languages represented Asian

45

Middle Eastern

â•⁄ 8

European

20

Indian Subcontinent

11

Chinese 24 Korean 15 Thai 4 1 each: Vietnamese, Taiwanese Arabic 5 Turkish 2 Amharic 1 French 3 English 2 Russian 2 Portuguese 2 Spanish 2 1 each: Czech, Dutch, German/Turkish, German,  Hungarian, Italian, Luxembourgish, Polish, Romanian Telugu 6 1 each: Bangl, Kannada/Hindi, Indian?, Nepali, Tamil

This research was a survey and interview study that took place in three stages. Participants in the research study were drawn from the approximately 130 international students, both graduate and undergraduate, who began their studies at this university in fall 2006. Part 1 of the study was a survey. All students who placed into L2 English writing courses on the basis of their scores on the required English Placement Exam were surveyed in their classes about their previous experiences writing in both English and their native/strongest languages. 84 filled out the survey, 54 graduate students and 30 undergraduates, 31 women and 53 men. The home regions of the 84 students who completed the survey were East Asia, South Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. The majors represented spanned the variety of curricula available at this institution, but it should be noted that most of the students in Liberal Arts were in fact in various sciences, including computer science. Part 2 of the study was text-based interviews (see Appendix.) On the surveys that the students completed in Part 1, they were invited to participate in an interview intended to explore the kinds of instructed and uninstructed, academic and

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Table 3.╇ Majors Agriculture Business Communications Engineering Fine Arts Liberal Arts Nursing Health and Human Science Undecided

â•⁄ 7 14 â•⁄ 2 29 â•⁄ 1 21 â•⁄ 2 â•⁄ 3 â•⁄ 5

Table 4.╇ Students interviewed Undergraduate students Graduate students Total

Females

Males

Total

â•⁄ 9 â•⁄ 8 17

â•⁄ 3 14 17

12 22 34

non-academic genre knowledge they drew on to complete the placement essay assignment and to follow up on questions in the survey which would make more explicit the types and origins of the students’ genre knowledge. Of the 84 survey respondents, 34 were willing to be interviewed, 22 graduate students and 12 undergraduates. The interviewees gave permission to have available for discussion at the interview their placement essays and a piece of writing they were working on for a class they were taking. The discourse-based interviews lasted 20–40 minutes and were recorded and transcribed with permission of the students. Transcripts were reiteratively read as a group; in addition, sets of materials from each student interviewed were read separately as full sets (i.e., the essay exam, the survey, the text written for a course, and the interview transcripts for each student). Transcriptions were analyzed using standard qualitative data analysis methods to create coding categories across participants to answer the research questions. The few interviewed students who anticipated writing assignments in disciplinary courses (such as journalism) the following term were invited for an additional follow-up interview. In this 3rd part of the research, this subset of 7 students (2 graduate students and 5 undergraduates) was questioned about how and to what degree they felt they were being confronted with new literacy tasks in their courses and how they were dealing with them.



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

To sum up: Research stages

Participants

Part 1: Survey on previous writing experience 84 incoming students (54 graduates and 30 undergraduates) placed into L2 writing courses Part 2: Interviews on the type and origin  of the students’ genre knowledge

34 of the survey respondents (22 graduates and 12 undergraduates)

Part 3: Follow-up interviews on students’ changing understanding of and approach  to new literacy tasks

7 students (2 graduates and 5 undergraduates) who anticipated writing assignments in their disciplinary courses

Results Research questions 1 and 2: What genres are these writers already  familiar with? Where did this knowledge come from? Tables 5 and 6 show which genres the surveyed students had experienced before enrolling at this institution. Table 5.╇ Types of prior writing in English TOEFL Essay Professional articles Essays Reports Lab reports Research papers Summaries Notes (on lectures or reading) Friends/family letters Business letters Journals/Diaries Email Blogs/Webpages Poetry/Fiction

% Graduates

% Undergraduates

50 33 57 54 43 46 56 59 57 30 28 94 19 â•⁄ 9

73 20 80 57 30 40 53 83 67 30 27 97 33 30

. In view of length constraints, the remainder of this report will focus primarily on writing in English.

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Table 6.╇ Types of prior writing in strongest/native language Professional articles Essays Reports Lab reports Research papers Summaries Notes (on lectures or reading) Friends/family letters Business letters Journals/Diaries Email Blogs/Webpages Poetry/Fiction

% Graduates

% Undergraduates

54 76 65 52 59 61 74 67 33 37 78 41 26

37 83 57 43 50 83 83 77 33 57 77 43 63

Of the 30 undergraduates, 27 or 90% had had writing classes in English in their home countries, with only 3 students (2 Europeans and 1 Indian) saying they never did. These writing classes were essentially split between high school and university so that fully 67% of the undergraduates felt they had written some or a great deal in English. The types of writing they had produced in the past were widely varied, from the obvious TOEFL essay to a range of reports, summaries, and letters. Of note here is the number of students who had experience with note-taking on readings or lectures in English (83%), the almost universal experience with email in English (97%), and the surprising number who wrote fiction or poetry in English€(33%). Among graduate students, a smaller number than undergraduate students reported having taken classes specifically in writing in English (72% vs. 90%) but still quite a high percentage. It seems reasonable to assume that graduate students are generally older than undergraduates and so the upsurge in teaching English writing outside English dominant countries would have touched fewer of them and later than it had the undergraduates. The graduates also show a substantially smaller percentage (32% vs. 67%) as having had such classes in high school. Still over 60% of the graduates surveyed felt they had some to a great deal of experience writing in English. Fully 30% of these graduate students had already written professional articles in English. More than 50% had experience with the kinds of academic or professional writing entailed in reports, research papers, or summaries in English (and over 50% had written professional articles in their L1). There was only one



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

student with no email in either language, although, as with the undergraduates, a greater number wrote emails in English than in their L1 (94% vs. 78%). Overall the surveys indicate that more multilingual students are apparently writing more than they were reported to write in earlier times. In addition, although the percentage of undergraduates and graduates who said they had written very little, some, or a great deal in English was comparable, significantly more undergraduates, that is, younger students, than graduates reported writing in genres like essays (80% vs. 57%), notes on lectures or reading (83% vs. 59%), blogs (33% vs. 19%), and fiction/poetry (30% vs. 9%) in English. Nevertheless, the surveys show that both groups had experience with a wide variety of genres.

Research question 3: What do these multilingual writers know  about the genres they are familiar with? To answer this question a subset of 34 of the 84 students responding to the survey were then interviewed. The goal of the interviews was to get a more specific sense of the students’ previous genre knowledge in order to see how that knowledge might later inform their approach to the new genres they were confronting in their new academic setting.

Perceptions of writing generally As might be expected, a great deal of the genre knowledge of these writers was implicit. In answer to the question of how they knew how to perform the many writing tasks they had accomplished, an important theme in the answers was the assertion that they just “felt” or intuited how the text should work. These students described their writing as “just writing naturally” or without having to think about it. One theme reiterated in answer to the question about how they would approach the writing tasks they would be encountering in their new writing

. I particularly value interviews with students because they provide a glimpse into what the students take for granted, into something of what their assumptions are. At times this is quite eye opening. For example, one theme in the interviews was the expressed belief on the part of several students that the writing in the students’ L1 had no structure, no organization. A student from Luxembourg even claimed that Luxembourgish as a language had no grammar. Clearly the students’ views on what characterized academic writing were informed by their educations, possibly their cultures, but in addition, their views depended on how they had taken up those elements and created their own understandings. These are the understandings that they then bring to our classes.

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environment was the anticipation that the way a text was written in their L1 would be the same as it would need to be written in English. A difference in perspective did show up however in some students’ comments. Students from East Asian language backgrounds generally perceived English writing as structured just like writing in their own L1s, with the only major differences having to do with some language level features like whether metaphors or aphorisms would appear or how direct a statement might be and how easily they themselves could manipulate the language to create the text. In contrast, the students whose first languages were European tended to see English writing as excessively structured and in this way different from writing in their own languages, where they claimed there was no structure to follow at all. Rather, the writing just flowed, came naturally. As one student said, (1) You just write and see what you get. (37)

Despite the perception (described below) of overly prescriptive English forms, a theme among the Euro-language students’ comments was their focus in L2 writing on showing their style and individuality, just as they would in their L1 writing. They described their writing goal as coming up with profound ideas and felt that writing in German, Dutch, Russian, Romanian, or “structure-less” Luxembourgish had no particular organization. Overall the expectation was that aspects of both the procedural and declarative knowledge the students had developed through their previous writing experiences would be fairly directly transferable to their new environments. In addition to their implicit or generalized genre knowledge, these writers had however also constructed and were constructing more explicit declarative knowledge which included both general features of writing (such as superficial micro features of text intended to create formality or an academic tone – regulatory text fragments like However or Under these circumstances) and understandings of certain specific genres.

Understandings of specific genres: Essay writing One of the most striking findings from the interviews came as these multilingual writers commented on the prior writing experience or genre knowledge they called upon to help them respond to the essay writing task that formed a part of the placement exam. Here they spoke little of drawing upon the wide variety of past writing experiences they had. Instead they relied on materials and instruction that specifically prepared them for “English academic writing” or essay exam writing.



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Nearly all interviewees reported that they had taken writing exams in English before, sometimes several times, and they had been taught or learned on their own the specific genre they plugged in for all English essays: the classic sentence or two of orientation, aggressive thesis statement (I strongly agree/disagree), development paragraph with some examples if possible, and conclusion. The students also enumerated several transition words (“teachers love” these, as one student reported) such as according to, however, moreover, in spite of that should be sprinkled into proper academic essays. Audience considerations were generally regarded as irrelevant because the audience was always the same, an evaluator. This genre and its generic features was learned in schools, in special English training classes, or through readily available manuals that teach English essay exam preparation, all pushing the same format. More significantly, the students seemed to equate essay writing with academic writing in English generally. But both undergraduates and graduates clearly distinguished between this rigid and formulaic genre, that is, academic essay writing in English, and every other kind of written genre. The advantage of the formulas for these students, aside from the fact that this kind of formulaic writing apparently works well for English writing exams, is that having the frame and these highly desirable transition-type words, decreases the cognitive load they must bear as they work through expressing their ideas in L2. Furthermore, because of time limits on exams, writers have little time to think through or plan their responses to essay prompts; following rigid patterns means both organizational and some ideational problems are pre-solved, which presumably frees up cognitive space for other issues. As a student from Korea expressed€it: (2) … when I write in English, structure – sometimes it goes really bad. Because if I write in Korean, I can … concentrate on the text. But if I write in English, I should think about the words and the grammar order and other kind of things. So I can’t concentrate only in text. … It’s hard. … if I start with introduction and go to the body and I try to write some of my thought, and during writing, I also think about grammar order, … I couldn’t think about what I’m writing at that time, so the context [content] goes wrong way. … it goes another way. And sometimes I wrote something it’s not related to the context [content]. (22)

Most of the interviewees saw the purpose of essays as primarily to show English proficiency. Presumably to show proficiency while at the same time freeing up cognitive space, students memorized not only lists of linking, transition, or connecting adverbs or phrases but even lists of impressive entire sentences supplied by exam preparation manuals and internet sources. One student mentioned “the

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red book” that gathered some of these for memorization and that was a familiar resource for him and his peers. But the English academic essay genre suffered harsh criticism as well. Having written the essay required for the GRE in addition to the TOEFL essay, several graduate students were able to use it as a point of comparison. They noted, for example, the confusing disjuncture between the perceived requirement to use formal language in essays on such exams as TOEFL and the perceived informality of the topics typically given, only requiring reference to personal life experience. Furthermore, several European students noted that they did not consider such essay writing intellectually demanding; being overly simplistic, it was not worthy of university level students. As one student said, the English writing courses they took taught them how to write these kinds of essay exams but did not really teach writing. Instead, the formulaic idea of the “basic frame” was described over and over. In all the repeated descriptions of exactly the same framing pattern these students had learned in their English writing courses abroad, only one student mentioned that they had also been advised to spend time thinking about the topic before writing. For some students, then, the formulaic kind of writing they were taught and had experienced in English academic essays was liberating because it freed up cognitive space for other L2 writing concerns. For others, it was constraining and juvenile. But as will be clear from subsequent findings, any value, usefulness, or transferability of this kind of restricted writing was circumscribed in that it appeared to present itself as part of the available reservoir of genre knowledge to be applied only in academic essay writing. While the graduate and undergraduate students generally concurred in their descriptions of their experiences with and understandings of English essay writing, their experiences with writing other genres in English and their explicit understandings of them differed considerably.

Understandings of specific genres: Undergraduate disciplinary writing Aside from business memo writing, which a few of the 12 undergraduates interviewed were directly taught, these students were not able to explicitly describe many features of the previous genres they had written. They also had difficulty saying much specifically about how they used knowledge of previous genres in . The GRE is the Graduate Records Exam required by many US institutions to admit students into graduate programs of study. It is administered, like TOEFL, by Educational Testing Services.



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

new situations. Instead their comments focused on the new writing tasks they were being given and described where the help to accomplish them came from, as described below.

Understandings of specific genres: Graduate disciplinary writing The 22 graduate students interviewed had developed more explicit genre understandings than the undergraduates, particularly about disciplinary writing, and were more aware of the need to handle different rhetorical contexts differently. The specific kinds of writing mentioned most frequently were research articles (RAs) and work place reports, both high stakes writing. Compared to writing English essays, writing research articles was described as learned to a much lesser degree through direct instruction, with disciplinary professors providing instead some directions and patterns, but mostly samples, models, readings, and, crucially, feedback on graduate students’ attempts to replicate them. Thus the students learned this genre more by doing than by having structures described, as with essays. They also expressed much more commitment to this genre than to essay writing and a more defined though still generalized sense of audience: the scientific community at large or generally other researchers in the same field. The graduate students’ understanding of writing research articles divided into two main rhetorical themes. On one hand, findings in research articles were described as simply speaking for themselves, not particularly dependent on rhetoric. If an article was not accepted for publication or for conference presentation, it was only because the research findings were not new enough. In the other view, the graduate student writers felt they had to find the rhetorical means of convincing their audience of the importance and novelty of their research findings. One interviewee insightfully noted that it was not the research that bore the burden of being convincing but the writing itself because the research was what it was and could not be changed. While the first view is less specifically rhetorical than the second, both exhibit a (learned) awareness of a larger, if generalized, rhetorical community into which their texts were launched and a specific sense of this genre as previously developed through their literacy experiences. While research articles were at least modeled by more experienced insiders, the next most frequently mentioned type of writing in the graduate interviews, reports, was the least instructed. This type of writing was typically learned on the job, often by carefully considering and responding to a need or request coming from a boss, senior co-worker, or corporate entity/agency. The descriptions of these reports showed the most sensitivity to audience, and the interviewees who

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talked about them seemed to have the most sophisticated ideas about writing. Left to figure out for themselves the rhetorical context, they aimed for sensitivity to that context. One graduate student working with food borne diseases, for example, described how he framed his reports depending on whether he was preparing them for an academic audience or for a funding agency, as each had different interests. When asked how he focused his purpose in convincing donors to donate, his astute response was that what was important was not his purpose, but their purpose for giving money, and he slanted what he wrote to accommodate that purpose. Thus, in reports, the audience was tangibly present in the writer’s mind. In short, these graduate student writers had developed a fairly clear and explicit sense of the two genres, the RA and the report, which they felt were the most significant in their past writing experiences and which were also the most important ones likely to be required of them in their future work in new settings.

Research question 4: How do these students anticipate that their prior genre knowledge will inform the writing required in their new university settings? In response to questions about the resources they would draw on for the writing they would be experiencing in this new environment of a US university, the undergraduates and graduate interviewees again differed considerably, with the undergraduates relying far less on previous genre knowledge than the graduate students. For both groups each writing task accomplished shaped the approach to future writing tasks but, perhaps as a result of the higher stakes involved or a more pointed need to position themselves within various literacy communities, the graduate students appeared to have a more conscious understanding of how that might be accomplished. For the undergraduates, aside from the specifically taught genre of business memo writing, much writing required in their university courses was entirely new and was perceived as accomplishable in one of two distinct ways. In one scenario the students referred to the disciplinary genres, much as they had to writing in L1 and other non-essay genres, as simply coming naturally, for instance in response to a professor’s question, like an extended monologue in a conversation or email, though more formal. In the second scenario, disciplinary writing required of them came with an elaborate set of guidelines to help the students understand how to complete the task since, as reported in previous research (Leki 2007), for the most part, students were regularly asked to write in these classes in genres they had never even read before and that maybe did not exist outside that single course. For example, one psychology class asked students to write a “concept paper.” Two students



Chapter 5.╇ Multilingual writers expanding genre repertories

referred to the “concept paper” as though this were as common a genre as a letter, one generally known to all and likely to be assigned again in other courses. In both these scenarios the undergraduates relied on being supplied with some kind of framing that would broadly serve to guide their writing in any genre required in their courses. In other words, it was this new writing experience itself and not the prior genre knowledge they had brought with them that would constitute the genre knowledge they expected to be able to draw on in future writing tasks at the university. In sum, to complete new literacy tasks, the undergraduates relied on both previous and new literacy knowledge and experiences: a general sense of natural logic and flow, formulaic prescriptions of academic essay structures, a small amount of direct writing instruction in certain disciplinary courses (e.g., business memos), and the suppliance of guidelines for the completion of specific writing tasks in disciplinary courses. Each of these learning-to-write contexts also encompassed an accretion of specific genres which expanded the literacy repertory they could then draw upon. In other words, the occasions themselves of writing constituted learning events that would in turn configure their new and expanded background knowledge. The focus of the graduate interviewees differed. In terms of the previous literacy experiences they could draw upon and the smaller range yet greater understanding of the genres they expected to be writing, the graduate students much more consistently referred to language-level resources such as fluency developed from email, oral presentation classes, and conversations rather than the rhetorical or genre-type resources they brought with them from their previous writing experiences. For the graduate students with their more sophisticated understanding of disciplinary genre requirements, language, not genre, presented the puzzle and language solved rhetorical problems. For example, one student explained that it was essential in writing RAs to emphasize the importance of the work being described. But that emphasis was accomplished through a certain type of language that he plundered from previously published research and inserted into his texts. (See Flowerdew & Li 2007 on language re-use among scientists.) As he explained: (3) You have to let the audience know what this paper is talking about and how important it is. … [You have to] set the problem. … Problem, one solution, and advantage of this solution and the problem of this solution, the kind of problem. And here this is very important [reading from his text], “However, none of the surface treatments has shown conclusive evidence of effective.” However, I think however is very important. However. And then I will give

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what this paper is going to do. … like here, I know this is very simple but I think it’s useful. [Reading from his text:] “A series of laboratory experiments … .” (33)

This writer intended the text fragment However not as an ornament to show proficiency (a tendency much more marked for the undergraduates) but as a flashing light to the reader to indicate precisely where in this document the reader could find the significant professional contribution that his research was making. It was in this sense that describing language as the greatest challenge demonstrated at the same time conscious recognition of the existence of genre requirements and options. Thus, undergraduates expected to rely on a general sense of writing and on certain learning events in order to progress. For graduate students, who were more familiar with the specifics of the genres they had encountered and more sensitive to audience and purpose issues that subtend generic decisions, it was not past genre experience but rather language – language experience and language learning – which emerged as the salient and critical feature of writing and which they would need not only to use well but also to expand upon. Their L2 writing would thus occasion opportunities to learn – and practice – language.

Research question 5: What kinds of changes did the writers note  in their perceptions of writing in English? Seven students participated in all three parts of this study, returning in the second semester for another set of interviews. The changes they noted in their perceptions of writing in English over the period of the study fell into three broad categories: rhetorical framing, specific writing techniques, and language. Rhetorical framing included developing a personal voice (“how to make your own style” [17]) and an expanded consideration of audience, in this case the realization that not every audience can be expected to be familiar with the topic addressed and that adjustments need to be made for the “regular person” such as (4) more background and more instruction for manager and more explanation for my finding. … where the problem comes from, why the problem is important to do some research on it, why people are interested in it and how many methods can be used and what are they. (4)

In addition to learning such technical features of academic writing as how to write an abstract, generate ideas through free writing, and access appropriate resources, several students mentioned learning how to use citations properly. But they were all able to understand that using citations was not only a technical issue but also



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a rhetorical one. One undergraduate student said she now knew how to use citations to make her writing “spicy” (16). Another noted that citations provided the credibility her professors required of her arguments (43), and a graduate student saw citations in a research article as both positioning the research reported by giving “a good impression” and providing a service to other researchers by pointing out previous research of potential interest to them. But, perhaps predictably, the major impact of more than a semester spent writing in an English dominant university setting was on language proficiency: increased vocabulary, particularly of the non-technical type, increased fluency and ability to use complex sentences and use them correctly, and automaticity in the ever popular linking or transition words. One student described how she consciously expanded her disciplinary vocabulary. As she read, she said: (5) I was interested what kind of language they use when writing specifically about art subjects. … I was trying to mimic the style. … I’m trying to use all my lectures too and try to listen what kind of language you need for this specific purpose … art history. … I just try to mimic those phrases. I mean, for example, … you say that “the lines lead your eye into the depth of the picture.” It “leads your eye” somewhere …â•›. These kinds of phrases. (40)

In at least one case, the growing command over language had even become exhilarating: (6) … now I adore to write. … I like the English language more now. I’m more passionate. … I’m looking up vocabulary or trying to memorize lot of synonyms for words because that’s important. … I really write and write and write and write. And I see that I improve my writing. (41)

Much of the teaching and learning the students mentioned came directly from their writing course. That the writing course should have emerged more frequently as a significant resource than previous genre knowledge, particularly for the undergraduates and for specific language and rhetorical features of writing, makes sense since what the course taught was explicit, declarative knowledge that the writers could then reference consciously whereas the influence of previous genre knowledge – no matter how influential – perhaps remained implicit. But as the newly passionate writer quoted above suggested, some of this learning came mainly from practice and the opportunity to write. As one noted:

. It is also conceivable that the interviewees felt obligated to mention the writing course as useful because the interviewers were members of the English department.

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(7) … the teacher taught us many details, many tips on writing, how to do academic writing but you can’t really learn that unless you write a [professional] paper by yourself. Yes, I learned a lot from that class and I had a good time but unless you write a paper by yourself you don’t know what you are learning.€(33)

Discussion This research systematically surveyed and catalogued graduate and undergraduate multilingual students’ genre experience previous to their enrollment for the first time at a US university. These students proved to be quite experienced at a wide variety of writing tasks. Such information is valuable to writing teachers, who can no longer assume that multilingual students studying in an English medium university for the first time are novice writers. But another goal of the project was to gauge what these writers’ genre knowledge looked like and how it changed over time in response to encounters with new genre demands. It became clear from their responses to the interview questions that a great deal of their literacy knowledge was implicit. Nevertheless they also described certain explicit understandings of certain previously encountered genres (RAs, reports, business memos). But the primary genre these students had declarative knowledge of was academic essays, and what the students had to say about essay writing in English confirmed the worst fears of genre researchers.

Genre teaching and learning In discussions about what should be taught in writing classes, especially in L2 writing classes, there has been tension between, on one hand, the need to give students guidelines, scaffolds, and, in effect, rules to assist them in learning new genres and learning them quickly (Johns 1995) and, on the other hand, the desire to allow students the freedom to explore their ideas through writing without too much formal constraint, particularly in general writing courses that are not tied to specific disciplines. Yet all writing instruction, including in general writing courses, is necessarily instruction in the creation and use of some genre; the question is which one and how explicit the genre is made to students. Overlapping with these questions are the consistent cautions raised by genre researchers and theoreticians who warn practitioners that genres are not merely formal features of text but rather are dynamic responses to recurrent communication needs within a discourse community (see Chapter 6 this volume). Writing



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teachers are urged not to teach the kinds of fixed rhetorical formulas or formats that students nevertheless often appreciate and that are based on patterns genre researchers themselves uncover in their genre analyses. These forms are said to represent only the superficial shell of a disciplinary communication; that shell in a sense misrepresents generic disciplinary communication by drastically oversimplifying it. Yet, L2 writing textbooks, including quite recent ones, not to mention the many online and print manuals available to teach essay writing, continue to represent genres as static forms with an overlay of paying attention to audience and purpose. (See, for example, the extensive discussion in You 2010.) There seems to be a certain inevitability in genre instruction turning into precisely what genre researchers fear for two reasons. First, in fact the easiest feature of a genre to teach and to learn is those formulas, formats, and text structures. As Tardy (Johns et al. 2006) has suggested, in learning to write, as in learning generally, it is not possible to learn everything at once. Thus, it is likely that students (and their teachers) first grab on to the easiest portion of what is to be learned and then gradually add more and add more refinements, given a need to do so. Second, partly driven by the inclusion of writing sections on international English exams required for access to tertiary education in English medium countries (like TOEFL, IELTS, MELAB), more attention is given to writing and writing instruction in school settings world wide than before, not only in formal schooling but also in after school courses, exam preparation courses, and language institutes. Cram schools, manuals, and even regular classrooms, as well as the students themselves, may feel they simply have no time to spend on hazy, fuzzy, indeterminate information about situated writing, and so the rigid English exam genre is being taught and learned all over the world to accommodate these exams. The irony is inescapable. In the 1980s, L2 writing teachers in the US exerted pressure on the Educational Testing Service, which creates and administers TOEFL, to include a direct test of writing in the TOEFL exam because they felt the multiple choice format of the then current TOEFL was not a fair evaluation of a student’s writing or even language ability. The introduction of the Test of Written English (TWE), a direct writing exam, was supposed to encourage a deeper interest in writing as an actual means of communication in L2/FL courses rather than merely using writing as a means of practicing low-level language by filling in sentences with correct grammatical forms. The introduction of TWE succeeded at this goal but at the same time gave birth to or strengthened the monster of the English L2 essay exam genre. This genre as described by the students in this study is every bit as low level and mindless as filling in missing blanks with correct grammar.

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Transferability and writing-to-learn In relation to how previous genre knowledge is transferred to new settings, a major finding of this study was the agency the students exercised in selectively transferring knowledge. This agency is perhaps inherent in the notion of far transfer. Agents are less likely to transfer knowledge to new situations perceived as unlike the old ones. This understanding of transferability played out in two ways. First, the students interviewed described English essay exam writing as a special genre and many of them recognized its limited application to other writing contexts and thus did not talk about transferring essay writing to new contexts. Perhaps because they had other literacy experiences to draw upon, sufficient scaffolding for the new literacy demands they experienced, or simply appropriately flexible views of writing (perhaps derived from their array of previous literacy experiences), they appeared to recognize on their own that academic essay exam writing could be encapsulated and set aside as they drew upon, expanded, and stretched the rest of their genre repertory to fit new circumstances. In this way, previously acquired information on how to write an RA, for example, was transferred to new writing contexts (i.e., the transfer of old skills occurred) but not essay exam writing, except to more essay exam writing. Second, the new writing contexts themselves were apparently not experienced as blank spaces devoid of information into which previous genre knowledge could be transferred in a lump. Instead, the new contexts were demanding, formative, and dynamic spaces, filled with new language from readings and lectures, demands for different understandings of audience, information about new writing techniques such as citation practices and new rationales for their use – and these students responded appropriately to these new contexts. It seems in fact that the term transfer itself is inadequate to describe how the students adapted to their new literacy environment. They had come loaded with previous knowledge and experiences but not as statically transferable fixed notions about how to engage their new tasks but rather with enough flexibility to recognize and respond malleably to the new rhetorical situations they encountered. These L2 students’ antecedent genres played a complex role as the foundation for their new literacy tasks. They had served as writing-to-learn experiences – or perhaps more accurately, as having-written-to-be-able-to-learn. In other words, we might surmise that in writing a wide variety of antecedent genres these writers had learned, sometimes implicitly sometimes explicitly, that writers make different decisions as they write different genres, learning in the very process itself of writing these different genres a collection of options from which to then select and recombine in approaching new writing contexts. And it is in being confronted with new writing tasks that writers have the occasion to actualize those options



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into new possibilities and configurations that then form the foundation for yet more rounds of expansion. Furthermore, writing entails various other by-products besides genre expansion. As noted by Manchón and Roca de Larios (2007; see also Chapter 4, this volume), the problem-solving nature of writing may realize the language-learning potential of L2 writing in part by providing a kind of “internal feedback” to match against communicative intentions (p. 107). Neither the university disciplinary courses that these students enrolled in nor the English writing course they were assigned to regarded language learning as a central goal. But institutional and curricular goals often differ from writer goals (Cumming 2006). The students themselves both clearly intuited and displayed the language-learning potential inherent in writing in an L2 (see also the research reported by Manchón & Roca de Larios in Chapter 9, this volume). Their recruitment of lexical memorizing strategies was especially salient. These strategies came into play in part in response to these multilingual writers’ felt need to use sophisticated and varied academic vocabulary in essay exam contexts. It was also apparent in the writers’ language reuse strategies, particularly their appropriation of lexical bundles, which academic corpora studies have recognized as extremely common in academic discourse (cf. Ellis, Simpson-Vlach & Maynard 2008:â•›377–378). As Manchón and Roca de Larios (2007) point out, L2 writers need a wide range of strategies to deal with lexical problems as they search for a match between their intentions and expressions. It is in writing contexts that learning and using lexical bundles makes sense, and it is in seeking out and deploying such bundles that they are learned, as declarative knowledge becomes proceduralized, and eventually automatic (Manchón & Roca de Larios 2007:â•›106). In other words, as suggested in the linguistic progress the students reported in their interviews of the second term, learning-to-write and writing-to-learn feed each other in ever expanding cycles promoting proficiency.

Conclusion As L2 students cross linguistic, disciplinary, and cultural boundaries, we might anticipate that they will be open to the idea that what they will be doing will be new and different from what they did before. Since writing now appears to form a more substantial part of the EFL curriculum around the world, perhaps a reasonable goal might become helping them to expand their repertories by building on whatever antecedent genres they may already have and building on their individual improvisations or “dimly felt sense” (Freedman 1987) of how to approach a given writing task. To do this L2 and EFL writing teachers might need, first,

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to recognize that university students are not blank slates in terms of writing in English; they now appear to bring to their tertiary studies in English-dominant countries a repertory of writing experiences. Second, writing teachers may need to find out what kinds of writing experiences the students have had, which may be in fact substantial, how they think about these experiences, and what their theories are about how to perform various writing tasks, and then to move forward from there. Although the “news” that L2 students continue to learn and be taught the depressingly restrictive pseudo-genre of the English academic essay exam, and are perhaps still being taught that the most important genre to learn is the (old fashioned, belletristic English department) genre of the personal essay, the most heartening findings of this research are (1) the students in this study had no trouble setting aside the essay exam as, at best, marginal to their new writing tasks; (2) these student had had surprisingly varied and extensive experience in writing in both L1 and English L2; and (3) these student showed willingness to tackle new writing tasks and displayed flexibility and open-mindedness about the possibility that each of the those occasions would become opportunities to write-to-learn. In this way, learning to write and writing to learn mutually reinforce each other.

Acknowledgements As I look over the data, particularly the interview data, from research like this, I am humbled by the kindness and generosity of all the many students who over the years have been willing to take time out of their busy schedules to meet with me or my research assistants and tell us about their writing. I do not know how to thank them sufficiently for all that I have learned from them. Thank you as well to Rosa Manchón for her sensitive and most helpful responses to this text.

References Allen, S. 2004. Task representation of a Japanese L2 writer. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 14: 77–89. Cook, V. (ed.). 2002. Portraits of the L2 User. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Cumming, A. (ed.). 2006. Goals for Academic Writing [Language Learning & Language Teaching 15] Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Detterman, D. 1993. The case for the prosecution: Transfer as an epiphenomenon. In Transfer on Trial: Intelligence, Cognition, and Instruction, D. Detterman & R. Sternberg (eds), 1–24. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Devitt, A. 2004. Writing Genres. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.



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Dong, Y. 1998. From writing in their native language to writing in English: What ESL students bring to our writing classrooms. College ESL 8: 87–105. Ellis, N. C., Simpson-Vlach, R. & Maynard, C. 2008. Formulaic language in native and second language speakers: Psycholinguistics, corpus linguistics, and TESOL. TESOL Quarterly 42: 375–396. Flowerdew, J. & Li, Y. 2007. Language re-use among Chinese apprentice scientists writing for publication. Applied Linguistics 28: 440–465. Foster, D. & Russell D. (eds). 2002. Writing and Learning in Cross-National Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Freedman, A. 1987. Learning to write again: Discipline-specific writing at university. Carleton Paper in Applied Language Studies 4: 95–116. García, O. (2009). Emergent Bilinguals and TESOL: What’s in a Name? TESOL Quarterly 43: 322–326. James, M. A. 2006. Transfer of learning from a university content-based EAP course. TESOL Quarterly 40: 783–806. James, M. A. 2008. Transfer of second language writing skills: The influence of perceptions of task similarity/difference. Written Communication 25: 76–103. James, M. A. 2009. “Far” transfer of learning outcomes from an ESL writing course: Can the gap be bridged? Journal of Second Language Writing 18: 69–84. Johns, A. 1991. Interpreting an English competency examination: The frustration of an ESL science student. Written Communication 8: 379–401. Johns, A. 1995. Genre and pedagogical purposes. Journal of Second Language Writing 4: 181–191. Johns, A., Bawarshi, A., Coe, R., Hyland, K., Paltridge, B., Reiff, M. J. & Tardy, C. 2006. Crossing the boundaries of genre studies: Commentaries by experts. Journal of Second Language Writing 15: 234–249. Leki, I. 1995. Coping strategies of ESL students in writing tasks across the curriculum. TESOL Quarterly 29: 235–260. Leki, I. 1999. “Pretty much I screwed up”: Ill-served needs of a permanent resident. In Generation 1.5 Meets College Composition: Issues in the Teaching of Writing to U.S. Educated Learners of ESL, L. Harklau, K. Losey & M. Siegal (eds), 17–43. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Leki, I. 2002. Material, educational, and ideological challenges of teaching EFL writing at the turn of the century. International Journal of English Studies 1: 197–209. Leki, I. 2007. Undergraduates in a Second language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language learning contexts. In Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning, E. Alcón Soler & M. Safont Jordá (eds), 101–121. Dordrecht: Springer. New London Group. 1996. A pedagogy of multiliteracies: Designing social futures. Harvard Educational Review 66: 60–92. Norton, B. & Vanderheyden, K. 2004. Comic book culture and second language learners. In Critical Pedagogies and Language Learning, B. Norton & K. Toohey (eds), 201–221. Cambridge: CUP. O’Donnell, K. 2004. On the need to know students’ prior experiences with genre in the ESL writing classroom. (19 July, 2007).

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Reichelt, M. 2003. Defining “good writing”: A cross-cultural perspective. Composition Studies 31: 99–126. Reichelt, M. 2005. English-language writing instruction in Poland. Journal of Second Language Writing 14: 215–232. Rinnert, C. & Kobayashi, H. 2009. Situated writing practices in foreign language settings: The role of previous experience and instruction. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 23–48. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Sasaki, M. 2009. Changes in EFL students’ writing over 3.5 years: A socio-cognitive account. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 49–76. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Smit, D. 2004. The End of Composition Studies. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Spack, R. 1997. The acquisition of academic literacy in a second language. Written Communication 14: 3–62. Street, B. 1995. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. London: Longman. You, X. 2004. “The choice made from no choice”: English writing instruction in a Chinese university. Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 97–110. You, X. 2010. Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China. Carbondale IL: Southern Illinois University Press.



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Appendix Interview guide: Sample questions English Placement Exam Did you ever write anything like the essay for the EPE before? Tell me about it. What audience did you have in mind as you were writing the essay for the EPE? What do you think they were looking for or expecting in a good essay? Where did you learn to do that kind of writing? Previous writing experience What other kind of writing have you done in English? • •

Did you structure the writing in the same way as you did the EPE/TOEFL/GRE writing. If not, what was different? Who did you see as the audience for each of those other kinds of writing? What did you do differently because of that different audience?

Where did you learn those different approaches to writing? L1/L2 Imagine that you had to write an essay for a university placement exam in your home country and in your home language; would you change what you wrote here? How? Writing resources Which of your past writing experiences do you think will help you most to succeed in writing at the University here? Writing across the curriculum Do you have any writing assignments in your classes besides English this semester? • •

How do you know how to write them? What feedback have you had on how you’re doing?

chapter 6

Writing to learn and learning to write by shuttling between languages Suresh Canagarajah

Penn State University, US

This chapter considers how multilingual students might learn to write in different genres for different audiences and write to learn different ways of exploring and representing knowledge by shuttling between languages. It illustrates this possibility by analyzing how an advanced scholar from Sri Lanka switches discourses in recognition of the context of writing in his published research articles in both the vernacular and English, in local and foreign publishing contexts. The switches have implications for the knowledge represented in these articles. The author moves between different levels of descriptiveness, reflexive awareness, and analytical explicitness by moving between the genres and languages. He also adopts different ideological positions in these articles to critically negotiate the expectations of the respective audience and context, demonstrating his agency and voice.

This chapter examines a slightly different concern in the writing to learn/learning to write interaction. It explores how multilingual students can become sensitive to the ways in which writing shapes their thinking and knowledge representation as they learn to write in different languages. In other words, as students learn to write they should also write to learn new dimensions of knowledge. This chapter is related to Hirvela’s contribution to this volume. However, while Hirvela focuses on content or disciplinary knowledge, this chapter treats knowledge in a broader sense as involving cultural assumptions and ideological values in addition to disciplinary knowledge. In some ways, this exploration goes back to the pedagogical approach of McCrimmon’s (1984) based on “writing as a way of knowing.” The approach emphasized the close interaction between writing and the exploration and clarification . I thank Professor K. Sivatamby for encouraging me to study his writing strategies and permitting me to quote from his articles.

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of ideas. This tradition has been lost in the subsequent cognitive process revolution that emphasized the mental strategies and procedures that generated good writing. In the seminal model of cognitive process by Linda Flower and John Hayes (1981), knowledge was pushed outside the activity of writing. It was assumed that knowledge preceded writing. In other words, writing represented preconstructed knowledge – i.e., ideas remained unaffected by the form and process of writing (see Canagarajah 2002a, for a fuller discussion). Though later models of the writing process (cf. Hayes 1996) theorize the form/content relationship in more complex ways, the notion that writing starts from knowledge that is already available is a common assumption among practitioners. Teachers hold content steady and unproblematized, as they focus on what they consider the more important concerns of language and form. Consider some of the current EAP (English for Academic Purposes) approaches. Scholars in this tradition argue that based on “a pragmatic concern” (i.e., helping linguistically unproficient ESL students master academic writing), they prefer not to problematize academic knowledge (see Swales 1990:â•›9). Students are trained to develop the language and form necessary to represent the existing forms of academic knowledge rather than question it before or during the writing. Also the notion that the form and structure of their texts will shape knowledge in new ways is considered too difficult or irrelevant for ESL students (Johns 1990:â•›29). The relationship between writing and knowledge is conceived in complex ways by postmodern theories (see for a review, Canagarajah 2002a:â•›Chapter 5). These theories question the traditional assumption that knowledge is preconstructed (before the activity of writing starts) and that it is foundational (corresponds to a preexisting reality). It is now generally accepted that knowledge is rhetorical. Postmodern theories have acquainted us to the notion that knowledge derives from the interpretive play of linguistic, textual, and rhetorical frames on social and material life (see Byrnes this volume). For example, different forms and genres of writing shape knowledge in diverse ways. Bazerman (1988:â•›257–277) traces how the tighter formulation of the APA style manual in 1983 does not have to do merely with the form of writing. He finds that the style conventions are influenced by the dominant behaviorist orientation to psychology at that time. As such, they also place constraints on the way knowledge can be represented. For example, he observes that the APA citation system “is very convenient for listing and summarizing a series of related findings, but it is awkward for extensive quotation or discussion of another text, and even more awkward for contrasting several texts in detail” (274). What this means is that “individuals assumulate . There have been isolated attempts to address ideational content through such movements as writing as “the process of discovering meaning” – the title of an article by Zamel (1982).



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[sic] bits, follow rules, check each other out, and add their bits to an encyclopedia of behavior of subjects without subjectivity” (275). Thus the conventions evoke somewhat mechanistic and positivistic orientations to human subjects adopted by behaviorism. Multilingual writers face both challenges and possibilities in the writing/ knowledge interplay. They already come from writing and rhetorical conventions influenced by their first language when they learn those of the second (see Leki this volume). Rather than it being an innocent mastery of a new form for writing, these divergences have to be considered as having implications for the representation of their knowledge. It is possible to see the tensions in writing and rhetorical conventions as having ideological implications. New textual genres may shape the representation of their knowledge in dispreferred ways, sometimes suppressing certain forms of familiar knowledge, and imposing ways of presentation that are not empowering to second language students. It is for this reason that students have to be taught not only forms and conventions of the new language; they also have to be made aware of their implications for knowledge representation. Even as students learn the new genres of writing, they can modify them to suit their interests and preferred knowledge. As multilingual students shuttle between languages and discourses, they have possibilities of experimenting with different forms of representation and different potentialities in textual structures. We must also consider how the process of shuttling between languages itself may clarify and revise ideas for multilingual writers. This is analogous to the activity of “languaging” in second language acquisition, although in this case we would be applying the term to genres and discourse. Languaging has been defined as “the process of making meaning and shaping knowledge and experience through language” (Swain 2006:â•›89). It can function as a means of problem-solving by and through talk. In applied linguistics, researchers have found the fascinating possibility of decoding the vocabulary and grammatical items of one language by talking in another (see Swain et al. 2009). Such possibilities exist for multilingual writers as well. In fact, the possibility of looking at the conventions of writing in one language through the spectacles of another provides an effective form of defamiliarization of writing conventions, enabling multilingual writers to explore alternate textual forms and alternate ways of representing knowledge. The activity of shuttling between languages (and their attendant textualities and rhetorical conventions) might be treated as affordances for multilingual writers to explore new ideas and new forms of representation. We must recognize, however, that languaging in writing involves additional challenges and mediating factors, different from the contexts of speaking reported in the studies by Swain. Multilingual writers are languaging through texts. Texts bring their own genre conventions, identity positions, and culturally-informed

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values. The tensions that these mediating factors can create – i.e., between language, text, identity, and culture – can also be enabling. Students can make insights into the interconnections of these mediating factors as they shuttle through languages. Furthermore, we must realize that though learning to write and writing to learn are usually treated as orchestrating different process and outcomes, I am treating them as interconnected in this chapter. Learning to write is typically treated as involving learning form, genre conventions, composing processes, and organization of ideas in texts. Writing to learn can involve exploration of content, values, identities, and ideologies. Though there are differences in foci between writing to learn and learning to write, they are interconnected in many ways. Students not only learn what it means to construct texts in different languages; they also learn the diverse ways in which knowledge and identities can be represented through these languages and genres. Rather than merely accommodating to the dominant forms and knowledge of each community they are addressing through their texts, they are also able to adopt a critical stance as they see one community’s preferred textual conventions and knowledge from those of the other. Professional or advanced multilingual academic writers have already been representing their knowledge in diverse ways in the different writing contexts they have encountered. Often, they have explored and experimented with different forms of knowledge representation intuitively. As experienced writers, they have sometimes developed strategies for negotiating form and content, or rhetoric and knowledge, to their advantage. The practice of advanced multilingual writers may suggest what multilingual writing entails and also indicates the linguistic and rhetorical possibilities available for students. It is good to show such models of experienced writers and writing to multilingual students to encourage them to engage in creative and critical writing. In order to develop such a scholarly perspective and pedagogical practice, we need more case studies of individual authors negotiating multilingual texts. A closer analysis of a single author’s negotiation of languages and texts would provide a perspective on the subtle negotiations that take place between languages and texts. Therefore, the research question for me in the study reported in this chapter is: How does a single author present the same subject in different languages for different audiences and publishing contexts? We will thus be able to analyze how a multilingual writer shuttles between discourses, exploring, constructing, and representing different facets of his chosen subject, in the process adopting different identities and voices? We will thus be able to see how this shuttling activity enables the author to learn different potentialities of language in helping construct texts of different genre and cultural conventions; the analysis will also enable us to see how the author discovers resources for representing knowledge and identity differently through the different languages and texts. In this manner,



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we’ll be able to explore one dimension of the learning to write/writing to learn theme of this book in relation to multilingual writers.

The study In the following discussion, I will compare three different articles from the same writer in the same genre (research articles or RA) in two different languages (English or L2 and Tamil or L1) in three different rhetorical contexts: RA in L1 for local publication (Text 1); RA in L2 for local publication (Text 2); and RA in L2 for foreign publication (Text 3). It is fortuitous that the writing samples I collected from the author deal with the same subject: his analysis of the cultural formation of Jaffna Tamil society. Though the subject he discusses is the same, his themes and arguments are not. The writing samples are from a senior scholar in Sri Lanka. Professor Sivatamby has considerable exposure to the scholarly communities in the West. He obtained his doctorate in Drama in the University of Birmingham and has held fellowships in foreign universities, including Berkeley. At the time of writing these papers, Sivatamby was a faculty member in the Departments of Tamil and Drama at the University of Jaffna. In order to keep this discussion within a manageable level, I want to focus closely on the introduction of Sivatamby’s research articles to see how he frames his research objectives and argumentative position. I will bring the other sections of his articles to bear on the interpretation of his opening moves, especially his conclusion, to indicate the drift of his argument and discussion. I will use Swales’ (1990) typology of opening moves here, in what he calls the Create a Research Space (CARS) model. I will use this model only for heuristic purposes, bearing in mind that RA discourse conventions vary across disciplines and communities, if at all stable. I turn now to explain how Sivatamby constructs his opening in these three articles to suit the conventions of the community he is addressing. I show that he represents his ideas and argument differently in each article. Not only is he creative in making the adjustments necessary for each audience, he is also critical in challenging the assumptions of his audience and making a space for his own interests. Before I analyze the texts, I must introduce the social context that informs the articles of my subject. The articles discuss the cultural character of the Jaffna Tamil society in the North of Sri Lanka. At the time of the writing, the community is in the midst of a struggle for political autonomy from the government of . I am using the real name of the author as I am discussing articles that are already published.

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Sri Lanka, which is dominated by the ethnic Sinhala community. While Tamils are largely Hindu and speak Tamil, a Dravidian language, Sinhalese are predominantly Buddhist and speak the Indo-European Sinhala language. However, after colonization by the British from 1770 to 1948, there are Christians in both communities and English is spoken widely in the island. Sivatamby is writing in a context of heightened nationalism in the Tamil community where the dominant ideology is Tamil Only, which emphasizes purifying Tamil language of foreign borrowings and the culture of western values (see Canagarajah 1999:â•›Chapter 3). The dominant ideology in the community is based on a particular denomination of Hinduism, called Saivism, which affirms caste stratification and traditional rural values. Sivatamby’s articles explore the extent to which Christianity and liberal western values, introduced during British colonization, are now part of Tamil culture and identity. I must also define the constructs used in this study and the methodological orientation. The chapter explores the interconnections of discourse, textual genres, and language. Though interconnected, these constructs do not have a one-to-one connection (in an isomorphic manner) as theorized in some deterministic theoretical traditions (see for a review, Canagarajah 1999:â•›Chapter 1). They enjoy relative autonomy. Discourses are ways of speaking, writing, thinking, and behaving that are given coherence by one ideology or another. Therefore, discourses relate to how one may position herself in relation to power relations in society. Genres are part of discourses. However, discourses go beyond genres as genres relate to only textual patterning whether in speech or writing. Genres do have ideological implications, as their patterning is considerably influenced by social norms and conventions of appropriate communication. However, the focus of genres is on textual patterning. Of these three constructs, language is at the most micro-level of communication. Though a history of a language endows it with values (making it related to discourses), language is more fluid and creative. Therefore language provides the possibility of reworking genres (to take on new patterning) and resisting discourses (to facilitate critical thinking). To explore these interconnections in the genre of RA, I adopt Swales’s method of textography – i.e, “something more than a disembodied textual or discoursal analysis, but something less than a full ethnographic account” (Swales 1998:â•›1). The methodology provides interpretive latitude to connect discourse features of the text to wider influences from culture and society. Exploring the nature of textual changes through a close analysis, the study interprets the rationale for the different textual realizations. The changes reveal the genre constraints in the different writing contexts, the desired authorial identities, and the different rhetorical interests of the author.



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Findings Writing in L1 for the local community For readers of western scholarly communities, Sivatamby’s article in Tamil (Text€1) will be striking for the casual and relaxed opening. The author seems to be under no pressure to create a niche for this paper in the scholarship relating to this subject (move 2 in Swales’ CARS typology, after the opening move of “establishing the territory”). This peculiarity can be explained by the fact that one does not have to market a scholarly paper aggressively in the local academic community. There is no urgency to fight for publishing space, earn academic credit, or attract reader interest here. These are the reasons why western scholars adopt in their opening a “marketing discourse” (in Mauranen’s [1993] apt terminology). In the local context, academic publications are few and oral construction of knowledge€– in colloquia and public lectures – earns as much credit (see Canagarajah 2002b). Furthermore, material considerations such as the lack of good library resources and access to the latest publications also hinder local authors from creating a niche for their research. What local scholars must adopt, instead, is what I have called a “civic ethos” (Canagarajah 2002b). Scholars must show what important service they are performing for their community by writing this paper and/or constructing this knowledge. One does not write papers simply to develop an original viewpoint and earn professional or personal credit. Scholarship has to be socially responsible. There are many factors that motivate the civic ethos. As faculty members are sustained by public resources, they have to show the relevance of their work to the community. Also, in a homogeneous society, academics are expected to be sensitive to the needs of the community. Therefore, Sivatamby opens by arguing that it is unwise and unhealthy not to discuss the ideological character of our society – controversial though the subject may be – as Tamils are living in a time of ethnic conflict and identity politics that demands a reflexive understanding of their own social formation. In fact, the author uses the word “duty” at least twice to emphasize that he is fulfilling an urgent community need: (1) One of the features about Jaffna culture that is always visible but never discussed is a realistic depiction of the society. We do not speak or even attempt to speak about culture, which is always in front of our eyes besides regulating and controlling our social practices. Since this silence hampers the healthy development of this society, I am undertaking this analysis to fill this lack at least academically. At a period when our community is facing a serious crisis in its history, and when it is

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undergoing radical changes, it is the duty of the social sciences to at least provide some preliminary thoughts and data on our community’s fundamentals and assumptions. Research relating to Jaffna society from anthropology and sociology are poor indeed. There are only a few foreign scholars working in this field (Bryan Pfaffenberger, Kenneth David, Skjonberg). Tamil scholars who have earned international prestige in these disciplines – like S. J. Tambiah – themselves do not give full attention to anthropological and social scientific research relating to the concerns of Tamil Eelam people. In a situation like this, doing research on the nature of the social changes taking place here is the duty of academics at the University of Jaffna. I have been drawn to this subject from the experience of reviewing the tradition of Tamil literature from the disciplinary perspectives of social history, sociology, and anthropology. This article is being written from that academic background.  (Sivatamby 1992)

This opening is significant also for certain other omissions of RA introductory conventions. The article does not announce the findings (or the author’s argument) in advance (i.e., move 3 step 2 in CARS model). The author also does not indicate the structure of the article or the development of his argument (another important feature, move 3 step 3). Here, again, the author may be deferring to local expectations. In the local community, there is a preference for embedded modes of argumentation that respect the reader’s involvement in deciphering the threads of reasoning in the paper. Being too explicit and calculated about the structure or argumentation would project an image for the author as pompous and the reader as ignorant. The third paragraph appears to fulfill a literature review of sorts (an important step in the move of niche creation). But the names of certain authors are simply mentioned there. There is no citation either here or at the end of the article. Also, the positions or important findings of these scholars are not discussed. This peculiarity is probably because local scholars often know the names and texts of those who have published on a topic, but do not have the publications handy to do a close reading or to cite references (because of working conditions I discuss later). Also, the local scholarly community is small and intimate that a writer can assume that his/her readers are familiar with the references. In this sense, written academic discourse is reader-responsible. At any rate, the reason these names are mentioned here is to fulfill the civic ethos. The author is not interested in discussing their work in detail but only in pointing out why it is important for . The translation of the title is the author’s own. The rest of the text has been translated from the original Tamil to English by me.



Chapter 6.╇ Shuttling between languages 119

local scholars to address this subject. He intends to show that only foreign scholars have dared to address this subject, even though they too are few. It is possible also that these names serve to boost the authority and credibility of the author in the eyes of the local reader. The mention of these names shows that Sivatamby has the necessary background knowledge to discuss this topic intelligently. Another section that is not very prominent in this article is the description of methodology. Though this is a separate section that follows the introduction in Swales’ typology, the statements in the final paragraph of the opening section seem to serve as a declaration of research approach and disciplinary orientation in Sivatamby’s article. As a professor of drama, Sivatamby notes that his observations are primarily based on a study of literary texts (although from the analytical perspective of social sciences). There are many reasons why local readers/scholars do not expect in RA’s any statement of narrowly conceived research with sophisticated technology for extended periods of time. The work conditions in local educational institutions do not permit research of that nature. As long as one has an earned doctorate and possesses the relevant academic credentials, even informal, intuitive, or impressionistic observations are valued as scholarly knowledge. At the end of the introductory section, most western readers would usually ask: what exactly is the author arguing in this paper? We do not find any statements pertaining to the argumentative position in Sivatamby’s article. The rest of the article deals with two strands of culture developing in parallel in the community: one deriving from caste-based Saivite Hinduism and the other from more liberal Christian education. The author is detached for the most part, simply describing both strands, but not taking a position favoring one or the other. This partly has to do with the provocative nature of the topic, especially in the context of nationalism in the local community. Simply acknowledging that the Christian liberal tradition is indigenous to the Tamil culture is provocative enough for cultural purists. The author is already taking a critical stance in treating the liberal Christian tradition as part of the Tamil cultural makeup. He can assume that given the preference for indirect communication in the local community, the readers will already be making their inferences on the provocative implications of his argument for the hybrid Tamil culture. The author does not rub it in further. Researchers have found that in articles where the argumentative position is not clearly spelt out in the beginning of the text, scholars tend to state it at the end. Scandinavian scholars adopt an end-weighted development, where they state their argumentative position after letting the reader work out their own conclusions . Though some authors make a transition to the methodology section by mentioning their research approach in the introduction, this is the only statement of methodology in Sivatamby’s article.

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from the proffered data in the body of the text (see Mauranen 1993). However, instead of providing the argumentative position or a summary, what Sivatamby chooses to do at the conclusion of the paper is to apologize: (2) If I have troubled anyone’s mind with the manner in which I have presented this subject or the data, I ask for your pardon. [Then he quotes a religious verse that acknowledges his limitations, and invokes God to use him as an instrument for knowledge and human progress.]  (Sivatamby 1992)

The apology suggests that the author is aware that his provocative case for a hybrid culture would have been inferred by his readers at the end of his article, even though he had not spelled it out as his argumentative position in the beginning of the article or anywhere else in the article. The apology is also a very conventional speech act in local public speaking. Called avai aTakkam (“humbling oneself before the court”), this act may have connections to the rules of speaking in feudalistic times or before royalty. This is still the preferred opening move in public speaking. In local academic writing, I call this the display of a “humility ethos” (see Canagarajah 2002b). As for the argument of the paper, it remains completely implicit. In some genres of local discourse, even to offer to tie all the threads at the end of the article is to insult the intelligence of the reader by not letting him/her do the interpretive work. This is perhaps another reason why the author chooses not to state his position or summarize his argument in the concluding section. The humility ethos is also in display in his introduction. It is understandable that Sivatamby projects an identity that involves less self-display, agonistic tone, or claims to originality as stipulated by the CARS opening.

Writing in L2 for the local community The second writing sample (Text 2) by Sivatamby shows how an article to the local community is written in English. This article appeared in a collection of essays by local bilingual scholars, featuring diverse disciplinary perspectives on the Jaffna society. Though there are some changes in tone and discourse in recognition of the English-speaking (and bilingual) audience, there are still many similarities with the previous text as both the English-dominant and Tamil-dominant scholars belong to the same community with related RA expectations. This is how the article opens: (3) The Tamils of the Jaffna peninsula of Sri Lanka constitute the dominant Tamil group in the island. It is largely their experience at the national level and their perceptions of the Sinhalese and their motivations that have defined the Tamil grievances and decided the pattern of the struggle to redress them.



Chapter 6.╇ Shuttling between languages 121

An attempt is made here to understand the Jaffna man in relation to two of the most important ideological perceptions he has of himself: (a) the preserver of the great Saiva-Tamil tradition, and (b) the heir to the liberal traditions of the West and the reformist tradition of Gandhi symbolized by the Jaffna Youth Congress Movement. The Sri Lankan image of the Jaffna Tamil …â•›. The relevant census figures of the Jaffna district for 1971 were … [more background information follows].  (Sivatamby 1984)

As in the previous article (Text 1), there is no effort to create a scholarly niche for this paper; no announcement of argumentative position or main findings; and lack of an anticipatory mention of the article’s structure. What the author does achieve in the opening move resembles his rhetorical priorities in the earlier paper. There is an invocation of a civic ethos as he alludes to the current ethnic conflict in the island between the Tamil and Sinhalese communities. The author argues that it is important to understand the ideological character of Tamils if we are to understand the reasons for their resistance against Sinhala language. However, there are slight differences in the introduction that indicate that the author recognizes the changed audience and is adopting a different identity to fulfill their expectations. Note the formulation of the “problem” in the second paragraph. The author provides a formal statement of the research question discussed in this paper: “An attempt is made here to understand the Jaffna man in relation to two of the most important ideological perceptions he has of himself.” The author lists the two perceptions separately. Though this is the same ideological tension that is analyzed by the author in the earlier paper, it is presented more succinctly here. We therefore see a more formal and explicit orientation to the research subject. However, the announcement of the question serves a modest didactic function. The question indexes no debate or controversy. There is little evidence of an effort on the author’s part to convince or persuade. The change of tone and identity is further confirmed in the concluding paragraph: (4) The quantitative and qualitative changes that have taken place in the evolution of Tamilian nationalism, should be seen in the perspectivity of the liberal Youth Congress tradition. That would provide the nationalist ideology with a continuity and possibility of development on social democratic lines.  (Sivatamby 1984)

There is no pronounced expression of a humility ethos in this conclusion. There is a distinct academic ethos invoked here, with a suitable researcher-like language (e.g., “quantitative,” “qualitative,” even the neologism “perspectivity”). Furthermore, the contradictory ideological strands introduced in the beginning of

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this paper are reconciled in a subtle and unobtrusive way. I feel that this shift to greater formality, explicitness, and impersonality is in recognition of the English�educated ethos of the readers of this article. There is a slight shift in discourse from the more indirect, personal, and conversational style of the article in Tamil. There are also differences in the argument and ideas of the author. The author is able to explore and represent slightly different dimensions of his argument here. Not only is he merging both cultural strands together, he is taking a position on the nature of that merger. The author suggests that the liberal traditions of the West, manifested by the Youth Congress, will modify in a healthy way the chauvinistic streak in the religion-based Saiva-Tamil nationalist ideology. He looks at the combination of the dual strands of cultures as eventually complimentary and beneficial to the local nationalistic struggle. While the discourse of this more explicit and formal article in English does lend itself to a more explicit analytical approach, the author is also aware that the English-reading audience will be more receptive of the argumentative position that the Christian liberal tradition is part of the local ideological make up. However, he is challenging them in some way by asking them to see this tradition as not contradictory to the Saiva-Tamil based nationalistic ideology. He is asking them to look at it as fusing into and strengthening the dominant nationalistic ideology by adding a more democratic component to it. In this sense, the middle class English-educated segment of the community is challenged to consider its place in the local nationalist struggle.

Writing in L2 for the international community In the third exploration of the subject (Text 3), this time in a paper published in an international journal based in Sweden, we find even greater rhetorical shifts in the discourse in recognition of the foreign audience: (5) The current ethnic crisis … has brought about an overall unity and solidarity among the Tamils of Ilankai [i.e., indigenous name for Sri Lanka]. However, in terms of social formation – the social structure and relationships, the modes of production at the peasant level – we could easily see that there are three discernible Tamil formations …â•›. [brief historical introduction follows] So, any study of the history of the Tamil demands within the Ilankai context should necessarily focus on the nature and role of the importance of Yalppanam [i.e., indigenous name for Jaffna] Tamil society, the type of . Since this is a journal that is informed by philology, the author is using the etymologically more precise Tamil names for Jaffna (Yaalpaanam) and Sri Lanka (Ilankai).



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problems it faced, how it expressed and formulated them as its political grievances, and the type of solutions it put forward …â•›. Amidst the social and political challenges which it had to confront, the Yalppanam Tamil society developed two ideologies which have been the main source of its social, intellectual, cultural, and political sustenance. Those are: (a) the Saiva Tamil ideology propounded by Armuka Navalar, and (b) the reformist liberal ideology of the Youth Congress. They are in fact contradictory to each other, but in the manner they have been coalesced into that society and its political articulations, one finds the specific characteristics of the Yalppanam society emerging. A full scale intellectual history of Yalppanam would be the apt academic way one could see how these two strands have been woven into one whole. [A footnote refers to another article by the author titled “An Ethnography of the Sri Lankan Tamils”] In this paper an attempt is made to present in a preliminary manner the formation and the subsequent history, in outline, of the continuity of the Saiva Tamil ideology.  (Sivatamby 1990)

Though the civic ethos is thinly evoked in the opening line of the introduction with the reference to the ethnic conflict (though not by invoking “duty” as he did for the Tamil readership), the author quickly moves on to show the academic significance of his analysis. The introduction presents in an even more explicit way the centrality of this subject (move 1, step 1, in CARS). The author methodically lists about four issues of significance in his analysis – i.e., the role and importance of the Tamil society in the country, the type of problems it faces, how it expresses and formulates them as its political grievances, and the type of solutions it puts forward. Furthermore, the research “problem” is formulated even more rigorously and tautly (with both strands of ideology blocked separately for consideration)€– i.e., (a) the Saiva Tamil ideology propounded by Armuka Navalar, and (b) the reformist liberal ideology of the Youth Congress. Also, the potential contradiction behind this dialectic and the evolving paradox are articulated with greater complexity. Finally, in this introduction, the author fulfills an important step in the CARS model – announcing the present research (move 3, step 1b) – in a very formal and direct way: “In this paper an attempt is made to present in a preliminary manner the formation and the subsequent history, in outline, of the continuity of the Saiva Tamil ideology” (emphasis mine). The language is significant for the care with which it is chosen. Note the hedges in at least three places within a single statement. The author projects a very objective and restrained researcher-like ethos here.

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Though the introduction does not present the argumentative position, the concluding paragraph shows that the author is conscious of a progression in the argument through the paper: (6) But to say that the Saiva Tamil ideology has been weakened or is no more effective is to run to hasty conclusions. It should be remembered that the social base of this ideology at the place where it really rises – the rich peasantry – has not yet been changed in any effective sense. The possibilities of this ideology slowing down the social radicalization of the militants is not improbable.  (Sivatamby 1990)

The author assumes that the reader would have come to one possible conclusion while reading his analysis: “that the Saiva Tamil ideology has been weakened or is no more effective.” This is an argumentative position he has subtly developed in the article. Though he goes on to qualify this conclusion, it is remarkable that he has raised this possibility at all. In the local community, where the Saiva Tamil ideology might be considered in ascendance, the notion that the liberal western cultural strand might have weakened its hold will be considered provocative. However, he wants to nudge the reader towards another possibility which is also implicit in his analysis – i.e., that the character of the peasantry, which sustains this ideology, has not changed. Therefore, the ideology may not completely lose force. Furthermore, he projects a possible ideological development for the future€– that the values of contemporary militant nationalism may get modified (“slowing down the social radicalization of the militants”), nudged towards more chauvinistic tendencies under the influence of the Saiva ideology. This is a concession to the alternate argument. It provides a more qualified and balanced stance for the author. In fact, the possibility that the dynamics of the dual cultural strands can have unfavorable implications for the nationalist movement is a new theme. In the previous article, he represented the possible positive implications for the democratization of the nationalist movement. The author is therefore bringing out diverse other orientations to his subject in this genre of writing. Apart from being more at ease with a more impersonal readership outside his local community to explore the full implications of this dynamic, he is also able to consider unpopular possibilities that may not be countenanced by the local community. The more explicit analytical orientation available in this genre of writing also enables him to explore the nature of the hybridity in the local culture further. Whereas he only notes the possibility of hybridity in the other two articles, he follows through further here to consider the different social implications, political functions, and historical trajectories of this hybridity.



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Though the argumentative position is not explicitly developed in the body of the essay (in fact, the author adopts a narrative approach as he recounts important stages of the community’s history), he expects the reader to have followed the progression of his argument. This ending suggests a linear and goal-oriented development for the paper. The paper displays an end-weighted theme development. This observation would help us realize that while the author does make a shift to a slightly different discourse in this third paper, he has not changed his rhetoric wholesale. There are many features in this paper that are similar to the paper for the local Tamil audience (Texts 1 and 2). We find that even in Text 3 there is no explicit niche creation, no literature review, and no advance statement of the structure of the article. Similarly, the civic ethos is also strongly present in Text 3. These features are thus consistent across all three papers. I submit that the author is not giving in completely to the dominant discourses of western scholarly readers, although he is aware of their preferences and accommodates them partially. He chooses, however, to retain certain other features of his preferred discourse even as he writes to the western audience. We must wonder whether this is an act of rhetorical resistance. He is nudging the reader to shift to his discursive preferences, even as he shifts to theirs. If this is indeed the case, what the author is attempting in Text 3 is a multivocal discourse that merges the strengths of local scholarly discourse with the dominant conventions of mainstream academic discourse. This is an example of an author displaying voice and agency despite, alongside, and through the dominant rhetorical conventions by skillfully inserting his preferred strategies in the text. What I am suggesting through this analysis is that the author is not only being creative in shuttling between communities, he is also being critical in choosing the terms in which he wants to represent himself. The critical practice in his writing expresses itself in many different forms. There is an appropriative function of finding spaces within the dominant conventions to insert one’s own voice and preferred conventions. The author performs these strategies in a rhetorically satisfactory manner that he can manage to persuade a refereed western journal on the publishability of his article. He probably also has enough insider awareness to realize that the conventions of western journals are variable and negotiable that a hybrid text has a good chance of getting published. The author may very well be using a critical resource that multilingual subjects are specially endowed with. These are the benefits of the “double vision” or “in-betweenness” that is engendered in the interstices of discourses (Bhabha 1994). As he moves between languages and discourses, he uses the conventions of one to critically orientate to the conventions of another. It is in this manner that langauging helps Sivatamby to see through the possibilities and limitations of different textual traditions, develop strategies for

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merging these traditions, and construct hybrid texts. The fact that Sivatamby could get published in a western journal, despite choosing not to fulfill all the established moves of RA, and in fact adopting certain atypical moves, shows that oppositional or alternative forms of writing are not impossible in the academy. It is interesting to speculate on the influences on Sivatamby’s texts from the manipralava (mixed code) writing tradition from pre-colonial times in Tamil communities. At a time when Sanskrit was the language of religion and philosophy, Tamils mixed it with their vernacular when they started using Tamil language for such purposes (see Viswanathan 1989). Through such mixing, they challenged the elite and sacred status of Sanskrit while upgrading Tamil as a language suitable for discoursing on such subjects. After the encounter with British colonialism, Tamils have adopted the same strategy of code mixing in their postcolonial academic and literary writing. Even popular magazines fluidly move between English and Tamil, without translations or glosses, assuming a veritable bilingual reading. I found in an informal telephone interview with Sivatamby that these strategies of shuttling between languages and texts were intuitive for him. He did not display a studied or analytical awareness of his multilingual writing practice. What seems to have developed his multilingual writing competence is his socialization into multilingual communicative practices and diverse academic communities. As I mentioned earlier, though Sivatamby is from the local Tamil community and is a scholar of Tamil language and literature, he did his doctorate in Birmingham (UK). His stay in UK gave him an opportunity to engage with British scholars and become familiar with their communicative practices. After returning to Sri Lanka to teach, Sivatamby has maintained his multilingual academic life, reading and writing in both English and Tamil. He has also enjoyed periodic invitations to speak and teach in foreign universities. These experiences have given him opportunities to defamiliarize himself from either communicative practice when inhabiting one of the other academic community. They have also given him lengthy experiences as insider to both communities. Besides, he has enjoyed the benefit of critical feedback from colleagues in these diverse communities. This long experience of shuttling between the local and international academic communities has possibly helped him develop his strategies of negotiating languages and texts. In short, Sivatamby’s writing competence derives from his protracted and lengthy socialization into diverse linguistic, cultural, and academic communities.



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Discussion We must consider the implications of Sivatamby’s writing practice to develop a pedagogical orientation that would do justice to the resources and strengths of multilingual writers. We must first note an important textual comparison in the examples above. There are greater similarities in discourse between the first and second texts although they are written in different languages (i.e., English and Tamil). On the other hand, though the second and third texts are both in English, the discourse is very different as the author is writing these papers to different communities. This comparison should show us that language does not determine the difference in the texts of multilingual authors. Rather, it is context or audience that motivates the difference in discourse and identity. Sivatamby’s first two texts are roughly similar in their implicit theme development and invocation of civic ethos and humility ethos. This similarity can be explained by the local audience he is addressing in these papers. In other words, it is not language or culture, but rhetorical context/objective that is the main variable in multilingual writing. Whatever language the authors are using, they can vary their style and discourse depending on the rhetorical context. This finding should be a corrective to composition teachers who perceive multilingual writers as always conditioned by their native language or culture. The comparison also shows that there are multiple genres of English writing for multilingual writers. Using English language does not mean a single way of writing. The same language may be used to construct different texts if the language is used for different contexts and communities. This should show us the limitations of thinking of a specific language as endowed with a specific culture or a specific mode of writing. Equating one language with one discourse (the practice of early forms of contrastive rhetoric and a tendency among some teachers still) is terribly limited. For Sivatamby, the same language holds very diverse possibilities – i.e., different textual realizations. Furthermore, both English and Tamil have multiple realizations in the same genre of RA writing. They provide possibilities for the author to adopt different discourses for the same genre, motivated by different linguistic and cultural preferences. Moreover, within the same text, Sivatamby finds ways of accomplishing diverse rhetorical acts. The text thus becomes hybrid. If we want to address the constraints in writing, it is more relevant to think about the repertoire of a writer than about the repertoire of a language or culture. The author can choose from the different options available to him or her as a multilingual. What is more fascinating about Text 3 (published in 1990) is that it was published about two years before the more informally and implicitly developed introduction of the first article discussed (i.e., Text 1, published in 1992). Even the

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second article (Text 2, published in 1984) was written 8 years before the local publication in Tamil (Text 1). This fact suggests that the more rigorous formulation of the argumentative position and research problem in Text 3 is not an effect of time (i.e., attributable to the extended period of gestation one may have enjoyed to sharpen the argument). If the author chose to open Text 1 in a less explicit and direct way, this is not an act of omission or failure, it is an act of choice. The indirectness of the argumentative position here does not result from inability; it is a conscious strategy for specific rhetorical reasons. The author is leaving aside the tight formulation of the research problem (that he has already published 8 years before this paper) in deference to the preference of local Tamil readers who expect a more implicit and subtle development of research findings. In fact, the author seems to even make a distinction between the English-based and Tamil-based readership in the local academic community. He is relatively more objective and explicit for the English readers in Text 2, which too was written before the Tamil paper Text 1. Furthermore, Sivatamby’s complexly formulated conclusion in Text 3 shows that the author can adopt the CARS model or a more front-weighted writing (cf. Mauranen 1993) typical of western RA’s if he wants to. He has his argumentative position, findings, and the different strands of argument carefully worked out for himself. But he is not choosing to present his argument in the CARS model in Texts 1 and 2 as he prefers a different mode of presentation in his writing for the local readership. It is interesting to note that his complex and critical position on the nature of the hybridity in the way the competing ideologies coalesce in Jaffna is a not a new realization at a late stage in his mature period of writing. Sivatamby was already aware of these possibilities in the first article he wrote, Text€3. The reason why he does not convey the same position in the other two articles is perhaps because it is not strategic to convey them in that fashion to the more sensitive local readership. Besides, there are other representations of the subject and theme that the genres and rhetorical contexts of Text 1 and 2 enable him to explore. Ironically, if the analytical orientation of Text 3 enables him to explore some of the critical ramifications of the cultural hybridity, the indirectness of Text 1 and 2 also enable him to subtly communicate some provocative ideas to the local community. Under the cover of indirect communication, he is able to encode locally unpopular possibilities without comment and leave the readers to work out the implications. In other words, the author is using the genres to his advantage, exploring different dimensions of his subject. This textual comparison illustrates the agency of multilingual writers. They are not linguistically or culturally conditioned to write only in one particular way. They can be rhetorically creative. In fact, it is their very multilingualism that may account for their creativity. They are endowed with that “double vision” that



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enables them to understand the possibilities and constraints of competing traditions of writing, and carve out a space for themselves within conflicting discourses. This realization should show the limitations of orientating to writers as coming with homogeneous identities. Multilingual writers, like everyone else, come with multiple identities. What they choose to display varies according to diverse contexts in order to achieve their interests. The issues of identity and community that we see in the background of this analysis are connected. Identity is constructed through languages and discourses. Though identity is not conditioned by language or one’s community, it is considerably influenced by them. Identity finds representation through language in relation to the community one inhabits and addresses, and is embodied in the textual and genre conventions one adopts for written communication. In this sense, identities are sociocultural and discursive. However, subjects have the ability to rise above the social and discursive influences. They can adopt creative and critical new identities in the texts they construct and the communities they address. In fact, their desire for agency and voice might motivate them to negotiate textual and community conventions in their favor and use language creatively to represent themselves advantageously. In Sivatamby’s writing, we see a multilingual who, while respecting the genre conventions and community values to present himself appropriately, subtly inserts new values and conventions from within to adopt a critical voice. In this manner we see in Sivatamby the hybrid, fluid, socially and linguistically constructed subjectivity poststructuralist scholars talk about (see Bhabha 1994). Before we move on to consider the pedagogical implications of this study, let us connect this analysis to the theme of writing to learn/learning to write. In Sivatamby’s case, the term “learning” cannot be used in the developmental sense, as Sivatamby is quite proficient in his writing. Rather, I am using “learning” in the sense of exploring, discovering, and realizing. Sivatamby, as he shuttles between languages and writes for his diverse audiences, comes to the realization of different strategic arguments he can make in different contexts. He is able to adopt slightly different positions on the cultural dilemma of the Jaffna Tamil society in relation to the different audiences he is addressing in English and Tamil, and in relation to the different textual/genre conventions he is adopting on each occasion. In these ways, he is writing to learn. However, in using the different languages to write different RA’s for the different communities, he is also exploring and realizing the pros and cons of different genre conventions. While he is at home in the local conventions of humility ethos and civic ethos, he also sees the need to adopt a certain extent of analytical rigor and decontextualized argumentation. On the other hand, while he is able to adopt the impersonal structure of CARS model for his opening for the international audience, he also sees the need to complicate

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the impersonality with a measure of humility and indirectness. In these ways, he is learning to write.

Pedagogical implications Teachers who essentialize the culture and discourse of multilingual students and assume that they will have limitations in transitioning to English-based or academic discourses may construct a pedagogy of self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, they can construct pedagogies that let students shuttle between languages and discourses, adopting different genres of writing, and exploring different dimensions of ideas and ideologies relating to their subject. We must keep in mind that not all textual or linguistic deviation is an error. Many of the presumed errors can be choices made by authors from a range of different options in order to achieve their communicative purposes. For this reason, we must encourage students to orientate to strategies of communication, and deemphasize a strict adherence to rules and conventions. The rules and conventions can be negotiated for one’s purposes with suitable strategies. Though Sivatamby is aware of the dominant conventions in each context, and in fact accommodates them on occasion, he also modifies them slightly for his purposes. We have to teach our students strategies for rhetorical negotiation so that they can modify, resist, or reorient to the rules in a manner favorable to them. Furthermore, we must encourage students to stop focusing on writing as a narrowly-defined process of text construction. Writing is rhetorical negotiation for achieving social meanings and functions. In other words, writing is not just constitutive, it is also performative. We do not write only to construct a rule-governed text. Neither do we write to convey preconstructed thought. We also write to explore new ramifications of a subject, think through different options, and represent different dimensions of a subject through the forms and genres we adopt. Furthermore, students should understand that texts are not objective and transparent, written only to reveal certain viewpoints or information. Texts are also representational. They display our identities, values, and interests. It is advisable, therefore, for students to engage with the text to accomplish their preferred interests rather than let the dominant conventions represent their values and identities. The pedagogy should enable students to be more reflexive to understand their interests in writing, values motivating their rhetoric, and identities constructed by their texts. A pedagogy of shuttling between languages can help students learn to write in different genres and increase their repertoire, while also using writing to learn different ways of representing knowledge through writing, hence the interconnection between learning to write and writing to learn.



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There are understandable reasons why some may have reservations against the proposed pedagogy. It might be pointed out that second language students are anxious about mastering the dominant conventions of academic discourse and will not be interested in creatively negotiating genres and discourses. From a more serious position, some scholars have argued that it is important to acquire the established forms and conventions before one can learn how to resist them (Hammond & Macken-Horarik 1999). Such arguments treat mixed forms and hybrid discourses as the exception. Homogenous and univocal discourses are treated as the norm. They also assume resistance and appropriation as taking more time to develop. However, scholars of multilingual communication point out that hybridity and appropriation are “natural” to multilingual communities (see de Souza 2002; Makoni 2002). Learning the norms of particular contexts can proceed hand in hand with a critical appropriation of them. More importantly, writing in conformity to established conventions does not provide voice but silence one underneath the established conventions. Such writing may in fact be considered mechanical and clichéd. Meaningful and creative writing involves a critical appropriation of the norms for one’s own purposes. However, a pedagogy of shuttling between languages does not mean insensitivity to norms and conventions. Those who have the ability to engage in languaging and shuttling develop a keener awareness of the norms and conventions of diverse communicative contexts, along with the ability to alter them creatively for their purposes.

References Bazerman, C. 1988. Shaping Written Knowledge: The Genre and Activity of the Experimental Article in Science. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Canagarajah, A. S. 1999. Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching. Oxford: OUP. Canagarajah, A. S. 2002a. Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students. Ann Arbor MI: University of Michigan Press. Canagarajah, A. S. 2002b. A Geopolitics of Academic Writing. Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press. de Souza, L. M. 2002. A case among cases, a world among worlds: The ecology of writing among the Kashinawa in Brazil. Journal of Language, Identity, and Education 1(4): 261–278. Flower, L. & Hayes, J. R. 1981. A cognitive process theory of writing. College Composition and Communication 32: 365–387. Hammond, J. & Macken-Horarik, M. 1999. Critical literacy: Challenges and questions for ESL classrooms. TESOL Quarterly 33(3): 528–543. Hayes, J. 1996. A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications, M. Levy & S.€Ransdell (eds), 1–27. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

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Johns, A. M. 1990. L1 composition theories: Implications for developing theories of L2 composition. In Second Language Writing: Research Insights for the Classroom, B. Kroll (ed.), 24–36. Cambridge: CUP. Makoni, S. 2002. From misinvention to disinvention: An approach to multilingualism. In Black Linguistics: Language, Society and Politics in Africa and the Americas, G. Smitherman, A.€Spear & A. Ball (eds), 132–153. London: Routledge. Mauranen, A. 1993. Cultural Differences in Academic Rhetoric. Frankfurt: Peter Lang. McCrimmon, J. 1984. Writing as a way of knowing. In Rhetoric and Composition, R. L. Graves (ed.), 3–11. Upper Montclair NJ: Boynton/Cook. Sivatamby, K. 1984. Towards an understanding of the culture and ideology of the Tamils of Sri Lanka. In Commemmorative Souvenir: Jaffna Public Library, K. Nesiah (ed.), 49–56. Jaffna: Catholic Press. Sivatamby, K. 1990. The ideology of Saiva-Tamil integrality: Its sociohistorical significance in the study of Yalppanam Tamil society. Lanka 5: 176–182. Sivatamby, K. 1992. YaaLpaaNa camuukaTai viLanki koLLal – aTan uruvaakkam asaiviyakkam paRRiya oru piraarampa usaaval (Understanding Jaffna society: A preliminary inquiry into its formation and dynamics). Prof. S. Selvanayagam Memorial Lecture 8, University of Jaffna, Sri Lanka. Mimeograph. Swain, M. 2006. Languaging, agency and collaboration in advanced language proficiency. In Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, H. Byrnes (ed.), 95–108. London: Continuum. Swain, M., Lapkin, S., Knouzi, I., Suzuki, W. & Brooks, L. 2009. Languaging: University students learn the grammatical concept of voice in French. Modern Language Journal 93(1): 5–29. Swales, J. 1990. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: CUP. Swales, J. 1998. Other Floors, Other Voices: A Textography of a Small University Building. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Viswanathan, G. 1989. Masks of Conquest. New York NY: Columbia University Press. Zamel, V. 1982. Writing: The process of discovering meaning. TESOL Quarterly 16: 195–209.

chapter 7

Beyond writing as language learning or content learning Construing foreign language writing  as meaning-making Heidi Byrnes

Georgetown University

The chapter argues that one way to advance the L2 writing agenda is to conceptualize learning-to-write and writing-to-learn as inseparable. The paper draws on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) as developed by Halliday for its conceptual and analytical apparatus. In particular, it highlights the construct of grammatical metaphor (GM) to elucidate how L2 writers can develop advanced L2 textual abilities. To illustrate evolving ways of knowing through languaging, the paper presents a single-case study of a curriculum-embedded task of summary writing at the early advanced stage of learning L2 German. Through diverse forms of GM use the writer is able to capture the multivoicedness  of the source text and recreate it in the multivoicedness of her own authoritative summary.

The field of second language writing (L2) has reached a certain threshold in its self-understanding. A number of summative statements in recent edited collections (e.g., Manchón 2009a; Manchón & de Haan 2008a; O’Brien 2004; Ortega 2009; Silva & Brice 2004; Silva & Matsuda 2010) express a sense of accomplishment. At the same time, other publications (e.g., Cumming 2001, 2009; Cumming & Riazi 2000; Manchón 2009b, in press; Manchón & de Haan 2008b; Manchón & Roca de Larios 2007; Ortega & Carson 2010) show awareness of research limitations. For example, Reichelt (e.g., 2001) documented a pronounced orientation toward second language, usually English as a second language (ESL) rather than foreign language (FL) writing. When FL writing is in focus, English tends to dominate, thereby creating educational dynamics that differ markedly from the teaching of other languages. Beyond the need for greater diversity (Manchón 2009a) and more contextualization in order to overcome empirical and educational

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shortcomings (Ortega 2009), L2 writing research may have a particular need for more closely aligning itself to theoretical insights in SLA (Ortega & Carson 2010). Numerous critical questions arise from these facts and concerns, particularly if one takes an explicitly non-English FL-motivated position. (Note: I will henceforth refer to that stance as “FL writing” or “FL learning,” contrasting it with the more comprehensive “L2 writing” and “L2 learning,” including EFL or ESL). What dynamics have marginalized research into FL writing and, by extension, research into understanding FL learning in general? What configurations have prevented L2 writing researchers from seeing in FL educational settings opportunities for more fully exploring the phenomenon of L2 writing? What consequences has the dearth of such research had for ways of imagining writing in FL settings, particularly in collegiate FL departments? And finally, what consequences has this research lacuna had for the understanding of L2 writing as an overall phenomenon? Posing such questions recognizes that complex assumptions, predilections, and choices have held sway in the two research and educational communities. English-dominated strands of applied linguistics have often bought into a nonÂ�humanistic social science or utilitarian means-ends philosophy of education, which clashes with the humanistic interpretive and cultural values orientation of the FL strands of the field. In turn, the demon bedeviling FL teaching has been that communicative language teaching has shown little interest in writing. In addition, increasingly abstract forms of theorizing literary-cultural studies have progressively sidelined the language-based nature of ways of meaning, interpreting, and knowing. Finally, intellectual rifts have become educational chasms where neither language teachers nor literary cultural studies scholars are prepared to address the kind of sophisticated content-based language teaching and learning in a foreign language that is at the core of a humanistic FL education. How to overcome such deep divisions? That possibility requires making a convincing case that researchers and practitioners in L2 and in FL writing have much to gain from opening up toward each other through a kind of intellectual, theoretical, and empirical cross-fertilization and translation between disciplinary discourses. I suggest that a favorable joint forum is circumscribed by this question: How can we link, in a principled fashion and under a long-term developmental trajectory, language learning and content learning in the activity of learning how to write? I suggest, furthermore, that collegiate FL departments offer a surprisingly advantageous site for understanding and resolving this long-standing challenge facing the entire L2 writing field. Two strands prominent in L2 writing research have sought to address this challenge, even if indirectly: (a) a more sociocultural orientation has considered



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how societal and educational settings affect language performance; and (b) a more psycholinguistic orientation has considered the effects on writing in terms of processing capacities, especially by considering the nature of tasks, the conditions for composing, and the manner and type of feedback (see Chapter 4 by Manchón). In both cases, scholars assumed that, by separately investigating various features of language learning, considerably less so of content learning, they might capture essential qualities of learning how to write in another language. Missing, however, are detailed investigations into how adult instructed L2 learners as L2 users accomplish the central task in writing, that of linking meaning and wording in extended texts. Such investigations would assume that learning-towrite and writing-to-learn are inseparable (a) for ontological reasons arising from the language-based nature of knowing; (b) for theoretical reasons derived from what we know about language as a social semiotic; and (c) for empirical reasons that recognize the meaning-making quality of any language use, including language use by adult L2 learners, and, by implication, adult L2 learning. Addressing these kinds of intricate interconnections in an instructed setting requires a functional theory of language that (a) understands textual meaningmaking as choices in wording in relation to probable meanings privileged in a particular, socially circumscribed writing event; and (b) supports learners’ emergent writing abilities through well-specified curricula and pedagogies. To my knowledge, the only theory of language that has explored language in that fashion while also attending to educational issues is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), as developed by Halliday and his followers (cf. particularly Halliday & Matthiessen 2004, 3rd ed.; also Hasan, Matthiessen & Webster 2005, 2008; Matthiessen 2009). It offers criteria that make it possible to begin to establish the significance of particular wordings as distinct from the occurrence of particular language forms, by relating them to other meaning and wording choices that could, perhaps even should, have been made in a particular composition. Because SFL also sets forth principled proposals about a general developmental trajectory that can guide teaching and learning it facilitates the exploration of the intricate interrelationship between writing to learn and learning to write over extended periods of time that is at the heart of writing research. As studies in L1 writing development (Christie & Derewianka 2008), in EFL/ ESL (Schleppegrell 2004) and, most recently, in FL writing have shown (Achugar & Colombi 2008; Byrnes 2009a and b; Byrnes, Maxim & Norris 2010; Colombi 2006, 2009; Ryshina-Pankova 2008, 2010), SFL appears well suited to capturing the elusive link between meaning and form and development in L2 writing within the humanistic-interpretive educational agenda of collegiate FL departments. In line with the theme of this volume, the remainder of the paper presents a singlecase study of a curriculum-embedded composing event at the early advanced

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stage of learning German as a FL. The case is derived from the work of my home department which has for over ten years conducted its educational practices with a focus on literacy development (see Developing Multiple Literacies 2000) and treats the writing of a summary of a source text as a thought-provoking process requiring a sophisticated linking of meaning and form. I begin by providing relevant background of the curricular and instructional context for the writing event. Thereafter I discuss the writing task and one learner’s written performance. Widening the observational lens, I then consider (a) how summary writing provides both a methodologically as well as a substantively interesting environment for a close investigation of content-language (i.e., meaning-form) links; and (b) how meaning↜–↜making and languaging in writing together exemplify core features of learning and educational knowing. I conclude with some implications for L2 writing research and educational practices for L2 writing development.

Establishing the curricular and macro-instructional context of the writing task In line with the earlier claim that substantive treatment of instructed writing development requires specification of relevant educational assumptions and goals, I offer the following overview. The German program at Georgetown takes a strong textual and literacy orientation by linking thematically organized literary-cultural content learning and language learning throughout the entire undergraduate sequence. It uses the construct of genre as elaborated through the so called Sydney School of SFL (for an overview, see Martin 2009), along with genre-based tasks, to enable all learners, including non-majors and those starting their study of German in the program, to attain advanced levels of ability in all modalities. To realize that ambitious goal, the curriculum relies on writing as an advantageous environment (cf. Harklau 2002; Pfeiffer & Byrnes 2009). Because the university strongly encourages study abroad sojourns and requires direct matriculation at German universities, the goal of enabling students to reach academic forms of literacy informs the entire curricular progression (see Byrnes 2002; Byrnes et al. 2006). Thus, within a five-level curricular progression Level 1 models short functional oral and written texts and emphasizes a whole-text-perspective that infuses instruction with a focus on the dialogic nature of meaning construction. In Level 2, one form of narrativity becomes prototypical, the personal story that relies on chronological ordering and provides rich contexts for modeling coherent and cohesive discourse. Level 3 expands language use from the personal to the public sphere, complexifies narrativity by means of different positions and forms



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of engagement of author and actor(s), and expands linguistic resources toward the expression of diverse cause-and-effect relationships and, more generally, logical relations. Level 4 courses seek to extend students’ discursive behavior from the concrete into the abstract realm, focusing on genres of public life and their orientation toward objectification and social group values. (For curricular details, see the website, Developing Multiple Literacies 2000; for extensive discussion, see Byrnes, Maxim & Norris 2010). Beyond these level-specific considerations, two overarching educative insights and praxes characterize the curriculum and instruction. The first pertains to the centrality of the semiotic shift from congruent to non-congruent semiosis (cf. Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Described simply, congruent semiosis is how we go about making meaning by moving directly from experience to language and is often associated with ‘oral’ language. Here, Participants, are expressed primarily as human identifiable actors (My friend), Processes as verbs (visited), and Circumstances through lexical items or prepositional phrases (Berlin, for the first time). By contrast, in non-congruent semiosis the same meanings are remapped to a different grammatical category – most often a noun – while yet retaining some of the process-meaning of the verb: My friend’s first visit to Berlin. Quite aptly that meaning-making resource is referred to as grammatical metaphor (GM). The second pervasive praxis is that the integrated, genre-based curriculum purposefully links reading, speaking, and writing within thematically coherent units. It is made explicit in functional, meaning-oriented, as contrasted with formal/grammatical terms, an approach that, by definition, must attend to the formal resources realizing meanings. The central role given to writing manifests itself in a stable format for writing tasks used throughout the program.

Implementing a learning-to-write and writing-to-learn pedagogy This paper focuses on the first writing of a summary or précis in Text in Context, usually the first Level 4 course taken by students. Occurring mid-way in the course, after the instructional equivalent of 255 50-minute contact hours, the writing task is well-embedded in terms of literary-cultural content, pedagogy, and conditions of composition and assessment. A variety of texts, including charts and diagrams, graphs, government-prepared descriptive overviews, and a range of journalistic texts, have already provided students with varied content information and positions regarding the chosen unit theme, higher education reform initiatives and their positive and negative consequences. The link between reading comprehension and summary composing was modeled with a particularly well written journalistic text, “Die Reform

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als Gerippe” (Reform as a skeleton, ) and involved a variety of scaffolded activities (e.g., reading strategies focused on discourse particles; resources for sequencing information in texts; identification and classification of linguistic means for expressing appraisal, evaluation, and judgment; development of semantic webs for core meaning areas like ‘reform/reforming’; differentiated expressions of reporting/projection; a handout on how to speak about texts, including overarching statements and ways of capturing the interrelationship between subcomponents and overall textual argument; and creation of a text matrix. By way of concluding these activities, students were given a model précis for the text. Students participated as a class unit in these in-class and at-home activities for the model text. They then performed the same sequence on their own with another text whose component tasks were handled in whole class work. Finally, students independently composed their summaries at home, using detailed instructions. These followed the standard format for all genre-based writing in the curriculum: (a) by task, defined as the genre; (b) by content in terms of obligatory and optional genre moves; and (c) by linguistic realization at the discourse, sentence, and lexicogrammatical levels. Assessment weighted all three categories equally; a feedback sheet commented on each in order to enable students to revise their work. Following departmental practice, the recorded grade was that given for the revision.

Source text and summary The source text, “Erst pauken, dann Party” (First cramming, then partying) is a journalistic article from Die Zeit (, Wiarda 2004). 1033 words in length, with a two-sentence subtitle-like descriptor, it is divided into 10 paragraphs. Its content traces proximate and indirect causes for a dramatic reduction in age of German university students, more in line with age patterns in other countries in Europe and elsewhere. These changes are discussed and appraised from various perspectives, with the author taking a critically up-beat view on the phenomenon. Thus cause and effect, before and after, and comparison and contrast moves are central to the article’s purpose of informing about and assessing the fact that an entire cultural value system associated with old university structures in Germany seems rapidly to be disappearing under the impact of global models of efficiency and competitiveness in education. As an example of journalistic writing it is well structured, approaching the characteristics of a concise factorial explanation: a phenomenon is observed, its causes and effects are uncovered, and evaluative comments are made.



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The source text is also an overtly multi-voiced text in that the opinions of a total of six education experts are woven into the author’s argument as a way of supporting it authoritatively; inclusion is via direct quotes, indirect quotes, and general textual reference. These experts’ language ranges from very formal to at times quite casual, even colloquial. The author’s language is formal public language, with complex syntax (in sentences extending up to 48 words) and technical vocabulary that presupposes high levels of awareness of the nature of the current changes. At the same time, his language use shows considerable engagement through ample markers of appraisal, word choices (Illusion), syntactic choices (even if), and, importantly, numerous adverbials and particles (finally, most likely).

Jill’s summary The participant as language learner and writer The writer Jill (a pseudonym) began her studies of German at Georgetown University during her freshman year by first enrolling in the non-intensive version of the beginning-level course (3 50-minute class meetings per week). During her sophomore year, however, she intensified her engagement with German, by consecutively taking two intensive courses (4 75-minute class meetings per week), respectively at the ‘Intermediate’ and ‘Advanced’ levels. During the fall semester of her junior year this progression placed her in Text in Context. An International Business and Finance major who during her high school years had a one-semester sojourn in South America, she was strongly committed to participating in a onesemester sojourn at the University of Munich during the upcoming spring semester, provided she could be cleared by the Office of International Programs, an academic-administrative procedure that would include a language assessment. Thus one might describe Jill as an instrumentally well-motivated student. But, as the following excerpt from two regularly administered class questionnaires shows, the source of her motivation goes beyond the customary instrumental/ integrative distinction. In particular, how she approached reading and writing, even at the beginning of the semester, indicates her considerable intellectual engagement in language learning. Her unedited questionnaire responses show her as a highly aware and reflective language learner who (a) thinks holistically at the text level as well as locally, (b) is in it for learning both language and content, and (c)€finds such language learning intellectually and, just as important, affectively appealing despite its obvious challenges.

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(1) My strengths definitely lie in listening and reading. … I would consider reading a strength because I have a well rounded vocabulary and am typically able to understand the key points of any text. Writing is an area where I struggle the most. In past German classes I have typically lost lots of points for minor grammatical errors, whereas the overall theme and content of my written work was strong. (2) My strategy for writing in German is very similar to my strategies for English. I rely upon a flexible outline to determine structure and make a conscious effort to incorporate words and phrases from class readings into my text. This is actually one of my favorite parts of writing in German. I enjoy the challenge of integrating phrases and vocabulary learned in class to fit seamlessly into my own written work. I have found it beneficial to write a second draft for major essays in previous German classes. Such a strategy has helped me to identify grammatical errors and content flaws. Revisiting my work to address these problems has often forced me to come up with creative solutions and deepened my understanding of the language.

At the end of the second unit, which included the summary writing task in focus and involved considerable amounts of reading and writing alongside opportunities for oral summaries of texts, she states: (3) This past unit has marked the most German progress that I have made in a concentrated unit of time. This is due in large part to the sheer volume of time I have spent studying texts and preparing for speaking activities. For the first time I am fully comfortable formulating complex sentences on the spot because I have a deep understanding of the particular subject matter and can draw on a wide variety of discourse markers. I took particular interest in the subject matter, especially the text Erst Party dann Paukn, because I will traveling to study abroad next semester.

As Jill’s comments show, it is possible to establish a link between content and language learning when language learning itself is presented as a language↜–↜based thinking activity. A detailed analysis of highly contextualized meaning↜–↜wording connections would then begin to capture what is ‘going on’ or ‘not going on’ under certain conditions of L2 writing.

General description of Jill’s summary Jill’s first draft summary, presented in unedited form in Appendix A (its translation is provided in Appendix B), is 526 words in length, a reduction by approximately half. Its 5-paragraph structure closely follows the instruction sheet in that



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the introductory paragraph was to provide a highly condensed overview of the entire article. It was to be followed by more detailed information about the arguments presented in the source text, a concluding statement that would overtly state the student writer’s opinion of how the article worked as a text, and how she viewed its content.

Analysis of wording choices that realize the summary task By and large, Jill’s summary is a successful example of the genre. As a first effort in the genre and the first instance of a text approaching formal academic composing it shows a good grasp of the content issues under discussion, is located at an appropriate academic register, deploys a range of general and technical vocabulary with only minor areas of miscommunication, and uses varied syntax, including good variation in theme and rheme progression. Its formal accuracy is high. In line with the previous discussion, I analyze two areas more closely, the interrelated features of the verbs of reporting and the grammatical metaphors (i.e., nominalizations) she deploys in order to (a) capture the gist of the article; (b) position herself vis-à-vis the content, the source author, and an imagined readership that relies on her appropriated expertise for expanding its own knowledge on the topic; (c) appraise the content that the text presented to her; and, finally, (d) fulfill these multiple demands in her own textual argument. First, with regard to the reporting verbs (marked in bold in Appendix C) she tends to stay on safe and neutral ground, preferring to make general observations and addressing the development of the source text argument largely sequentially, e.g., “befasst sich mit” (deals with, line 1), “nennt … eine Einschätzung” (refers to/reports a judgment, line 3), “unterstütz” (supports, line 7), “bietet … eine eingehende Behandlung” (offers a thorough treatment, line 9). At the same time, many of the verbal structures are blends of ideational and evaluative meaning, “weist darauf hin” (points out, used twice, though with different syntactic requirements, lines 13 and 18), “betont” (emphasizes, line 24), “befürwortet“ (advocates, used twice, lines 26 and 39), “warnt” (warns, line 36), “sich hingeben” (yield to, line€37). While she retains the sequential treatment of the text’s content, her reporting verbs do not merely refer to textually contiguous pieces of information. Rather, they frequently summarize information that extends over stretches of text of considerable length. The most prominent example of that is her opening reporting verb “nennt eine kritische Einschätzung“ (refers to/reports a critical evaluation, line 3) with which she characterizes the entire text as a critical treatment of the phenomenon of lower student age for German university students.

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At the same time, these reporting verbs also blend ideational with interpersonal functions, by appraising the positions of various experts and witnesses included in the source text. This requires not only an assessment of the importance of their respective contributions; it requires as well her own judgment about their value in the larger argument and decisions about how to give voice to them in the summary, inasmuch as she must choose wording along a continuum from direct speech to reported speech to beliefs that can be attributed to them. In her negotiation of multiple voices the source text itself becomes a key participant in how she writes her summary, an active player in its own right¸ highlighting Bakhtin’s insight (1981) that all texts are themselves a heteroglossic chorus of competing voices rather than a unified verbal world (cf. 270–275). Jill negotiates this challenge by frequently assigning to these textual voices the role of abstract, inanimate subjects in clause structures, e.g., “in der Meinungen … kontrastieren werden” in which opinions are contrasted (lines 6–7), thereby down-shifting them so that they very nearly disappear. Indeed, she incorporated the text’s frequent interspersion of expert opinions only indirectly, alluding to them only via “Meinungen von Experten und auch Studenten” (opinions of experts and also students, line 6) and attributing the gist of their contributions to the author as his opinion. As she down-shifts the experts’ presence she also evaluates the nature of their contributions through complex meaning choices realized in lexicogrammatical resources of wording. From a narrow factual standpoint some of these representations are incorrect inasmuch as she refers to ‘student opinions’ when their sentiments show up only indirectly in the author’s claim that students who are leisurely debating the state of the world, “debattierenden Müsli-Studenten,” (debating Müsli-students), are rapidly becoming a vanishing species. But her decision to both upgrade and reposition their voices can also be seen as strategically motivated in that it enables her to fulfill the genre expectations of academic summaries: by eliminating the experts’ at times chatty and colloquial voices, she creates a registerially consistently high summary that avoids dropping off into self-absorbed ‘he said, she said; and then … and then’ ways of including the contents of a source text. Formally, many of the reporting verbs involve a German word order requirement referred to as bracketing, which places separable prefixes of verbs or subcomponents of extended verbal collocations at the end of a clause, something that frequently means locating them at a considerable distance from the verb stem. Handling that central and notoriously challenging aspect of German lexicogrammar becomes crucial for both separable prefix verbs and for fixed collocations. Beyond purely formal aspects, it indicates how a writer deploys meaning-form links that: (a) markedly enhance lexically nuanced meaning-making; (b) expand clauses by attracting various intra-clausal elaborations (e.g., “wendet er sich zu”



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he turns to, line 22–23) that expand the nature of the information conveyed along with a significant increase in words per clause; and (c) also facilitate and even trigger the occurrence of complex clauses, a characteristic of higher registers, including academic-level writing. Usually expressed in terms of changing clause per T-unit statistics (e.g., “weist auch darauf hin dass” also points out that, line 18), it really signals increasingly sophisticated development of logical relationships among figures of information. Even more revealing of her ability to deal with the challenges of summary writing is her use of GM and other nouns, with such nouns typically appearing as bundles in academic language use. These nominalizations variously capture ideational, interpersonal, as well as textual aspects of the source text. Along with enabling pronominal and post-nominal modifications and extensions, nominalization expands Jill’s meaning-making options in a highly economical, textually smooth, and informationally dense way, as is shown in this example: eine kritische Einschätzung den Ursachen und Auswirkungen diese Phänonmens auf deutschen Studenten und auf der allgemeinen Hochschulkultur (a critical assessment of the causes and effects of this phenomenon for German students and the overall culture of student life). Additional examples are found in the coded text in Appendix C. More elaborated treatments with multiple GM tend to include technical vocabulary, itself derived from an earlier verb (e.g., “bilden” to form, educate). At some point language users no longer experience the ‘creative’ metaphorical fusing of meaning but simply work with the new nominal entity, here the technical term “Bildung” education. Another way to refer to that language resource is in terms of a faded or dead GM. Taken together, regular nouns, GM nominalizations, and technical terms, particularly when they occur in noun bundles, all contribute to Jill’s ability to present a competent authorial voice. The variety of GM and their modifications and extensions and the profusion of their occurrence represent considerable linguistic and conceptual accomplishments in the layering of meaning-making. Not only are they fundamental to the creation of a summary that is successful in terms of both content and language, the thoughtful engagement behind them can rightly be interpreted as learning to write, writing to learn the language, and learning about cultural phenomena in the German-speaking world at a sophisticated level.

Revisiting summary writing: Methodological and substantive issues Using Jill’s writing performance and some of its specific aspects for purposes of illustration, I now return to the initial argument by way of raising some methodological and substantive issues regarding this case study of summary writing.

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They are intended to bolster the claim that learning to write and writing to learn are inseparable (see also chapters by Leki and Manchón & Roca de Larios this volume), an insight that is particularly persuasive when writing is framed as an intellectually engaging, highly nuanced process of text-oriented choices in wording for meaning-making.

Methodological issues in investigating writing as meaning-making Methodologically, the choice of data was intended to tap into the well-known quality of case studies to generate hypotheses about complex phenomena that reside within a rich web of affordances and yet await further specification, a situation that seemingly applies to much in L2 writing. At the same time, data in this case study were already highly contextualized, therefore meaningfully interpretable. First, at the macro-level the data were derived from a well-described curricular context that clearly states how the learning of writing was imagined across the four-year sequence typical for U.S. undergraduate education. The writing performance was thus embedded in principled links between curriculum, writing pedagogy, and educational interests, both large and small, both long-term and short-term. That renders the performance interpretable at least with respect to those proposals, which were themselves tailored to the presumed characteristics of students at my institution (see also Byrnes, Maxim & Norris 2010). Second and at the micro-level, the written summary of a source text qua genre provides a favorable environment for probing the linking of meaning and form through choices in L2 writing from a process and a product perspective. This is so because it bypasses the dilemma for L2 writing research of determining what an author intended to mean in the first place. Though that dilemma can never be entirely removed, the task of summary writing provides a sufficiently knowable environment of objectively statable criteria – derived from the source text – to investigate the writer’s meaning↜–↜wording choices not just in terms of occurrence or non-occurrence but in terms of the nature and significance of either of these options. In other words, summary writing offers a near-unique window for tracing an author’s meaning-making in composing because these meanings are bounded by the requirement of the genre to express, in factually correct and textually economical ways, the ‘pre-existing’ meanings conveyed in the source text. But other, closer-to-the ground advantages also accrue to investigating summary writing. First, because the source text obviously deploys its own wording choices, how the summary writer does or does not appropriate them provides a tell-tale prism for investigating the nature of available meaning↜–↜wording links in a text that must meet certain expectations. That fundamental framing of the task



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holds even though wordings are always open to choices on the part of the writer, both in terms of meanings and in terms of their forms of realization. It is in this dynamic space that the L2 writer’s unique composing voice, just like the authorial voice of any writer, comes to life. Second, summaries provide a particularly well focused prism due to the overall demand that writers shorten the source text without distorting its underlying message, including its communicative ‘flavor.’ Because wording choices can be expected to be strongly influenced by the source text, any reuse of source text wording in L2 writing must, at the very least, be examined and interpreted within a broader textual environment, not automatically be relegated to impermissible appropriation of words, or plagiarism.

From condensing and paraphrasing to heteroglossic meaning-making through wording Beyond these advantages of summary writing, their value has consistently been recognized by their sheer prevalence in academic writing (e.g., for literature reviews, research proposals and reports, and academic essays in general). However, what constitutes a good summary is often taken to be intuitive, therefore remains unspecified (although see e.g., Brown & Day 1983; Cumming, Rebuffot & Ledwell 1989; Hare & Borchardt 1984; Johns 1985; Sherrard 1989 for general recommendations for summary writing and pedagogical recommendations for both L1 and L2 summary writing). It is therefore more than a little ironic that summary writing is frequently framed in terms of strategies that can be taught in a relatively straightforward rule-based manner, an approach that misses the interface between ways of meaning-making in both comprehension and production via wording. By contrast, Hood (2008) notes that there is much more to summary writing than the deletion of trivial or redundant information, superordination of lists, selection of topical sentences, and invention of non-existing topical sentences in order to improve the flow of the text. Accordingly, and using SFL as her theoretical framework, Hood characterizes summary writing as ‘multivoiced’ or ‘heteroglossic’ and as a complex process of representation that is a form of knowledge creation through language. In that sense summary writers move from being “consumers of research-based knowledge” to becoming “creators of research-based knowledge … [as they] position themselves in a field of knowledge by representing in a summary way the contributions of others so that they can be compared contrasted and evaluated” (351–352). Also as a result, summary writing sits in the difficult border land of ‘changing meaning’ – because any wording different from the source text has the potential of changing meaning – while at

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the same time having to capture faithfully, though by no means identically, the information structure and macro-Themes of the source text. As Jill’s data indicated, central to the act of reinstantiating meaning in her summary was a re-instantiation of attitude, that is, a changing of meaning in the interpersonal perspective, even as she had to attend to the ideational meaning of the source text. She needed to evaluate, appraise, even judge the source text author’s presentation of meaning (see Martin 2000; Martin & Rose 2003). Among the questions requiring answers were these: What attitudes did the author take across the entire text in what Hood (2008) has called “prosodic patterning of values” (362). What attitudes were expressed, perhaps quite subtly, in the author’s choice of lexical items? How might those need to be expressed relatively explicitly in her summary text in order to capture the thrust of the ideational meaning of the source text? How would this play itself out in her composing an academic text that was otherwise to assume a dispassionate, objective, and authoritative voice (cf. Martin & Hood 2008)? And, finally, what sort of a position, authority, and voice would she want to give herself in that multi-layered dialogue with the intended readers? There is little doubt that these challenges for developing a rich multivoicedness on the part of the L2 writer must be directly taken up in L2 writing instruction, with summaries providing a generic context that allows both teacher and learner to trace and improve the evolving complex multivoicedness. As the analysis showed, the most critical resource for accomplishing that task turned out to be grammatical metaphor (GM) (cf. Drury 1954). The pedagogical feasibility of taking that route is all the greater because the phenomenon itself has, of course, long been known to practitioners and researchers interested in academic writing, though in a less theoretically framed way than that provided by SFL. Typically, it was handled as vocabulary expansion, in the direction of what Flowerdew (2003) referred as signaling nouns (e.g., Jill’s “Einschätzung” evaluation, line 3) or what Francis (1994) has called labels, both of the prospective (e.g., “Beschreibung” description, line 5) or retrospective type (e.g., “Zeichnung” portrayal, line 42). However, what merits much more attention is its textual meaning-making propensities and advantages. Specifically, what such frequently used deverbal GM as approach, cause, claim, discussion, problem, proposal, reason, recommendation, suggestion demand and facilitate in academic writing is the possibility for linking several Themes and hyper-Themes across extended textual passages that connect entire domains of thought and reasoning with one noun. They are thus manifestations in the summary text of ‘thought-ful’ detections of forms of coherence in the source text on the part of the writer and deployment of resources for creating new forms of coherence, at a more abstract level, in the evolving summary text



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(Ravelli 2004). In short, the function of GM to condense and integrate through abstractions and generalizations creates dramatic meaning expansion at the local level and dramatic advantages for textual meaning-making.

The role of language in educative learning: Toward a meaning-based framework for L2 writing At the outset of the paper I argued that learning to write and writing to learn are fundamentally inseparable because educational knowing itself occurs at the intersection of language, learning, and knowledge. Though that assumption appears intuitively plausible to anyone engaged in language teaching, particularly adult L2 teaching, a long tradition in Western epistemology has consistently separated knowledge and language. As Christie (1989) observed, the interpretation of language as a ‘skill,’ so prominent in SLA research and so much loathed in humanistic circles, is particularly emblematic of that epistemological tradition, which is itself part of long-standing assumptions of general reasoning abilities of the mind. Bloom’s Taxonomy is but the most prominent manifestation of that stance, though it goes as far back as Thomas Aquinas. That prominence and long history notwithstanding, mother tongue education increasingly shows that “the development of the desired mental skills is entirely dependent on the mastery of the linguistic patterns in which these skills are realized” such “that ‘knowledge’ itself is constructed in varying patterns of discourse” (Christie 1989:â•›153). Worded even more strongly, “educational failure is largely linguistic failure” (Halliday 1975:â•›3, emphasis in original). At the other end of literacy education, too, namely the literacy of diverse academic disciplines and the professions, languaging and knowing in a social context turn out to be inseparable. Indeed, we refer to the existence of that link as indicating socialization into a field. Accordingly, the praxes of formal educational contexts can be presumed to benefit considerably from adopting a language-based theory of knowing and also of learning, such as SFL. A few of its major tenets will have to suffice here to provide a glimpse of possible implications for linking language and content learning in literacy development in general, in writing development in particular, and to begin to understand writing both as a text and as an event. A persuasive argument made in Halliday’s extensive writings on the relationship between language and education is this: children’s language development can be thought of in terms of three facets: learning language, learning through language, learning about language (Halliday 1993, 2004). While all three facets occur as part of a child’s socialization into her family and community (Halliday

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1975), education is particularly strongly implicated in the second and third facets: language becomes the major semiotic tool through which experience is interpreted and organized and awareness of the resources that language makes available for meaning something is expanded and gradually shaped into various forms of meta-awareness. Among the key insights learners must gain about a language system is its meaning-making resource quality rather than a rule-based quality. Importantly, the resources in question are located in the combined system of lexicogrammar, not grammar and lexicon considered separately, and are intricately related to the functions to which language is adapted. In other words, grammar in this expansive sense is meaningful in relation to social realities, a meaning base from which one can then build upwards to ‘meaning’, not knowledge in the conceptual way that is independent of language. This is so because “all knowledge is constituted in semiotic systems, with language as the most central; and all such representations of knowledge are constructed from language in the first place” (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999:â•›3). Accordingly, grammar is the engine driving the capacity of language to do what it does: to take over the material conditions of human existence and transform them into meanings. Grammar accomplishes this by being located between the semantic plane of words and the expressive plane of speaking or, in this case, of writing: it takes words and turns them into wordings. One can think of the content plane of language as having two strata, the semantics of words and its lexicogrammar. This results in the possibility of a given sign having multiple meanings and creating its own complex and open-ended network of semantic potential “in which meanings are defined relative to one another and hence can modify each other and also change in interaction with changes in the ongoing (semiotic and material) environment” (Halliday 1996:â•›7). Furthermore, some aspects of meaning are expressed more through words, others are more likely to occur in grammatical categories, where these extend along a changing continuum from obligatory to optional and situational (e.g., by register) according to context of use. For the L2 learner, the choice quality of language use begins with the fact that the language to be learned, qua language system, has already ‘made choices’ about where it prefers to load particular meanings along the continuum of lexicogrammar. SFL describes those options in terms of system networks in such major grammatical areas as speech function, theme, statement, mood and modality, clause systems (e.g., material, mental, relational), the verbal group, and appraisal, to mention only the most obvious (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004). These options and choices might also be described in terms of what constitutes reportable events in the language and what aspects of an experiential figure are less salient and therefore unreported. Not surprisingly, even competent L2 users are



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challenged as they sort out these intricate meaning↜–↜form interrelationships (cf. von Stutterheim & Carroll 2006).

Implications for FL writing pedagogy and research Given that inherent complexity and given that it will play itself out quite differently in different educational settings with different language pairings and different learners, perhaps a central conclusion to be drawn is this: a key challenge for L2 writing instruction is to foster learners’ capacity for making meaning-based choices by fostering their continued willingness and interest in making them in the first place. It is well-known that learner engagement varies considerably, with some aspects less and others more amenable to being affected by educational praxes. I have attempted to show that writing instruction aimed at supporting learners for the long haul of learning how to compose well needs a principled link to the educational interests of the educational setting. That requirement is best fulfilled by a curricular proposal that is itself linked to the activities of teaching, learning, and researching writing, where all are conceptualized on a long-term basis. Worded differently, to be useful talk about writing needs to be located within a larger educational philosophy that, ideally, will have been translated into a curricular proposal. Furthermore, to serve learners, the desired long-term curricular statements will have to meet much higher standards of explicitness than coursebased learning goals statements currently do. That means they will see repeated revisions as educational experience is accumulated. The real motivation behind the increased call for longitudinal studies and for replication studies lies exactly there: in the possibility to inform educational action. Looking at their pedagogical realizations, writing curricula must make sure that the particular slice of lived reality that their diverse pedagogical tasks instantiate and incorporate in instruction are not isolated, unmotivated ‘busy-work’ activity. The role attributed to ‘practice’ in L2 writing development rightly recognizes that good writing abilities are long in coming. But ‘not all practice is made equal.’ The most obvious way to offer worthwhile opportunities for practice is by consistently and continuously linking all modalities that are otherwise used to plan instruction, particularly the reading-speaking-writing connection. Finally, if research is to uncover what learning how to mean in a textual environment is all about, it will have to seek out environments in which learners are given the opportunity to focus on content that is worth learning, that is worth writing about, and that is worth making one’s own through the act of writing (see Chapter 3 by Hirvela). Most likely that will mean that research will need to locate itself in well specified educational environments that espouse such learning goals

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in the first place and then, to the extent possible, to retain their ecology rather than foregrounding diverse ‘instructional interventions.’ How to turn intellectually worthy content that is, at the same time, linguistically learnable into ‘interesting’ content so that it may become one of the most powerful forms of human motivation deserves particular attention from educators and researchers alike. Learning to write and writing to learn language and content can be imagined simultaneously when language professionals embrace a fundamentally semiotic position regarding language as a system of meaning potentials and regarding the nature of wordings in particular instances of texts. Such a stance enables language professionals interested in FL writing to appreciate that writing is a uniquely favorable environment for examining a phenomenon that is so fundamental to human knowing. That it should at the same time be a uniquely favorable environment in which learners can also develop the capacity to acquire cultural content is ample reason for us to embrace this profoundly educative responsibility and to dedicate our best professional efforts to it.

References Achugar, M. & Colombi, M. C. 2008. Systemic functional linguistic explorations into the longitudinal study of advanced capacities: The case of Spanish heritage language learners. In The Longitudinal Study of Advanced L2 Capacities, L. Ortega & H. Byrnes (eds), 36–57. London: Routledge. Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. Discourse in the novel. In The Dialogic Imagination, M. Holquist (ed., translated by C. Emerson & M. Holquist), 259–422. Austin TX: The University of Texas Press. Brown, A. & Day, J. 1983. Macrorules for summarizing texts: The development of expertise. Journal of Verbal Learning and Verbal Behavior 22: 1–14. Byrnes, H. 2002. The role of task and task-based assessment in a content-oriented collegiate FL curriculum. Language Testing 19: 419–437. Byrnes, H. 2006. What kind of resource is language and why does it matter for advanced language learning? An introduction. In Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, H. Byrnes (ed.), 1–28. London: Continuum. Byrnes, H. (ed.). 2009a. Instructed foreign language acquisition as meaning-making: A systemic-functional approach. Linguistics and Education 20: 1–79. Byrnes, H. 2009b. Emergent L2 German writing ability in a curricular context: A longitudinal study of grammatical metaphor. Linguistics and Education 20: 50–66. Byrnes, H., Crane, C., Maxim, H. H. & Sprang, K. A. 2006. Taking text to task: Issues and choices in curriculum construction. ITL: International Journal of Applied Linguistics 152: 85–110. Byrnes, H., Maxim, H. H. & Norris, J. M. 2010. Realizing advanced L2 writing development in collegiate FL education: Curricular design, pedagogy, assessment. Modern Language Journal 94, Supplement 1.



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Christie, F. 1989. Language development in education. In Language Development: Learning Language, Learning Culture, R. Hasan & J. R. Martin (eds), 152–198. Norwood NJ: Ablex. Christie, F. & Derewianka, B. 2008. School Discourse: Learning to Write across the Years of Schooling. London: Continuum. Colombi, M. C. 2006. Grammatical metaphor: Academic language development in Latino students of Spanish. In Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, H. Byrnes (ed.), 147–163. London: Continuum. Colombi, M. C. 2009. A systemic functional approach to teaching Spanish for heritage speakers in the United States. Linguistics and Education 20: 39–49. Cumming, A. 2001. Learning to write in a second language: Two decades of research. International Journal of English Studies 1: 1–23. Cumming, A. 2009. The contribution of studies of foreign language writing to research, theories and policies. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R.€M. Manchón (ed.), 209–231. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Cumming, A., Rebuffot, J. & Ledwell, M. 1989. Reading and summarizing challenging texts in first and second languages. Reading and Writing: An Interdisciplinary Journal 2: 201–219. Cumming, A. & Riazi, A. 2000. Building models of adult second-language writing instruction. Learning and Instruction 10: 55–71. Developing multiple literacies: A curriculum renewal project of the German Department at Georgetown University, 1997–2000. 2000. Drury, H. 1991. The use of systemic linguistics to describe student summaries at university level. In Functional and Systemic Linguistics: Approaches and Uses, E. Ventola (ed.), 431–445. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Flowerdew, J. 2003. Signalling nouns in discourse. English for Specific Purposes 22: 329–346. Francis, G. 1994. Labelling discourse: An aspect of nominal-group lexical cohesion. In Advances in Written Text Analysis, M. Coulthard (ed.), 83–101. London: Routledge. Halliday, M. A. K. 1975. Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language. London: Edward Arnold. Halliday, M. A. K. 1993. Towards a language-based theory of learning. Linguistics and Education 5: 93–116. Halliday, M. A. K. 1996. On grammar and grammatics. In Functional Descriptions: Theory in Practice, R. Hasan, C. Cloran & D. G. Butt (eds), 1–38. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Halliday, M. A. K. 2004. Three aspects of children’s language development: Learning language, learning through language, learning about language (1980). In The Language of Early Childhood, J. J. Webster (ed.), 308–326. London: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 1999. Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-based Approach to Cognition. London: Continuum. Halliday, M. A. K. & Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 2004. An Introduction to Functional Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Edward Arnold. Hare, V. C. & Borchardt, K. M. 1984. Direct instruction of summarization skills. Reading Research Quarterly 20: 62–78. Hasan, R., Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. & Webster, J. J. (eds). 2005. Continuing Discourse on Language, Vol. 1. London: Equinox. Hasan, R., Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. & Webster, J. J. (eds). 2008. Continuing Discourse on Language, Vol. 2. London: Equinox.

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Hood, S. 2008. Summary writing in academic contexts: Implicating meaning in processes of change. Linguistics and Education 19: 351–365. Johns, A. M. 1985. Summary protocols of ‘underprepared’ and ‘adept’ university students: Replications and distortions of the original. Language Leaning 35: 495–517. Manchón, R. M. (ed.). 2009a. Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Manchón, R. M. 2009b. Broadening the perspective of L2 writing scholarship: The contribution of research on foreign language writing. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 1–19. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Manchón, R. M. In press. The language learning potential of writing in foreign language contexts. Lessons from research. In Foreign Language Writing: Research Insights, M. Reichelt & T. Cimasko (eds). West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Manchón, R. M. & de Haan, P. (eds). 2008a. Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Research Insights. Special issue of Journal of Second Language Writing 17: 1–60. Manchón, R. M. & de Haan, P. 2008b. Writing in foreign language contexts: An introduction. Journal of Second Language Writing 17: 1–6. Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language learning contexts. In Intercultural Language Use and Language Learning, E. A. Soler & M. P. S. Jordá (eds), 101–121. Berlin: Springer. Martin, J. R. 2000. Beyond exchange: APPRAISAL systems in English. In Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, S. Hunston & G. Thompson (eds), 142–175. Oxford: OUP. Martin, J. R. 2009. Genre and language learning: A social semiotic perspective. Linguistics and Education 20: 10–21. Martin, J. R. & Hood, S. 2008. Invoking attitude: The play of graduation in appraising discourse. In Continuing Discourse on Language: A Functional Perspective, Vol. 2, R. Hasan, C.€M.€I.€M. Matthiessen & J. Webster (eds), 739–764. London: Continuum. Martin, J. R. & Rose, D. 2003. Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause. London: Continuum. Matthiessen, C. M. I. M. 2009. Meaning in the making: Meaning potential emerging from acts of meaning. Language Learning 59(Suppl. 1): 206–229. O’Brien, T. 2004. Writing in a foreign language: Teaching and learning. Language Teaching 37: 1–28. Ortega, L. 2009. Studying writing across English as a foreign language contexts: Looking back and moving forward. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 232–255. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Ortega, L. & Carson, J. G. 2010. Multicompetence, social context, and L2 writing research praxis. In Practicing Theory in Second Language Writing, T. Silva & P. K. Matsuda (eds), 48–71. West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Pfeiffer, P. C. & Byrnes, H. 2009. Curriculum, learning, and identity of majors: A case study of program outcomes evaluation. In Toward Useful Program Evaluation in College Foreign Language Education, J. M. Norris, J. Davis, C. Sinicrope & Y. Watanabe (eds), 183–208. Honolulu HI: National Foreign Language Resource Center. Ravelli, L. J. 2004. Signalling the organization of written texts: hyper-Themes in management and history essays. In Analysing Academic Writing: Contextualized Frameworks, L. J. Ravelli & R. A. Ellis (eds), 104–130. London: Continuum.



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Reichelt, M. 2001. A critical review of foreign language writing research on pedagogical approaches. Modern Language Journal 85: 578–598. Ryshina-Pankova, M. 2008. Creating textual worlds in advanced learner writing: The role of complex theme. In Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky, H. Byrnes (ed.), 164–183. London: Continuum. Ryshina-Pankova, M. 2010. Towards mastering the discourses of reasoning: Use of grammatical metaphor at advanced levels of FL acquisition. Modern Language Journal 92: 181–197. Schleppegrell, M. 2004. The Language of Schooling. A Functional Linguistics Perspective. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sherrard, C. 1989. Teaching students to summarize: Applying textlinguistics. System 17: 1–11. Silva, T. & Brice, C. 2004. Research in teaching writing. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 24: 70–106. Silva, T. & Matsuda, P. K. (eds). 2010. Practicing Theory in Second Language Writing. West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. von Stutterheim, C. & Carroll, M. 2006. The impact of grammatical temporal categories on ultimate attainment in L2 learning. In Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities: Constructs, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment, H. Byrnes, H. Weger-Guntharp & K.€A. Sprang (eds), 40–53. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Wiarda, J.-M. 2004. Erst pauken, dann Party. (15€June, 2009).

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Appendix A: Uncorrected first draft version of summary Das Précis: Erst pauken, dann Party Der Text „Erst pauken, dann Party“ befasst sich mit dem Thema Vergüngseffekt auf deutschen Hochschulen. Jan-Martin Wiarda, ein bekannter Experte in Bildungsfragen für Die Zeit, nennt eine kritische Einschätzung den Ursachen und Auswirkungen dieses Phänomens auf deutschen Studenten und auf der allgemeinen Studentenkultur. Bei diesem Text handelt es sich um eine Beschreibung des heutigen Systems, in der die Meinungen von Experten und auch Studenten miteinander kontrastieren werden. In seiner Ansprache unterstütz den Verfasser sein Argument vor allem mit Zitaten von Menschen, die ein altbegründetes Interesse auf dem Thema erhalten. Der Text bietet nicht nur eine eingehende Behandlung des Vergüngseffekts sondern auch eine klare Darstellung negativen und positiven Auswirkungen dieser Änderung. Der Autor leitet den Text ein mit einen Reihen von Statistiken, die das neigende Alter von Hochschulstudenten zeigt, und er weist auf dieser gesellschaftlichen Tendenz als Fortschritt hin. Im folgenden Abschnitt kommt die notwendigen Ursachen des Verjungüngseffekts vor. Die Verkürzung der Regelshulzeit, Wehr, und Zivildienst in Zusammenhang zusammen mit einer Verschiebung des Schulbeginns nach vorne illustriert eine enorme Sprung im vergleich zu früheren Studentengenerationen. Der Autor weist auch darauf hin, dass die europaweite Harmonisierung eine grundlegende Ursache des Verjungüngseffekts wird. Darüber hinaus bringt die Einführung dieser strukturellen Einheit durch Europa die Bachelor und Master Zertifikate mit, die den allgemeinen Zweck der Hochschulen geändert hat. Nachdem der Autor den Ursachen hinreichend ausführlich behandelt hat, wendet er sich die Auswirkungen der Änderung der Studentenkultur zu. Er vergleicht das Humboldtschen System, das ein selbstbestimmtes Studentenleben betont, mit der reformierten System, in der das Studium eine Zwischenstopp auf dem Weg zu Erwachsen wird. Danach wird die Studiengebühren befürwortet, und zwar konnte den Verfasser die Erwartung der persönlichen Betreuung von Studenten auf ihren Bildung darstellen. Obwohl die zunehmende Leistungsorientierung erhebt die Effizienz von Studenten, erklärt Experten im Artikel, dass dieser Ansieg nur möglich ist, wenn das Studium ähnlicher wie ein Job wird. Der Autor beendet diesen Teil seines Arguments mit einer Vergleich zu den USA. Die Studentenkultur, die längst Normalfall in den USA ist, ist in Deutschland prominentor geworden. Abschließend kehrt den Autor zu seiner ursprünglichen Behauptung über die VerjüngungÂ� effeckt und die allgemeinen Veränderungen des Studienkulturs zurück. Er stellt die negativen Aspekten von stromlinienförmigen Absolventen und das positive Potential von einer Erfolgsgeschichte gegenüber. Zusammenfassend warnt er die Bildungspolitiker vor, dass sie sich einer Illusion nicht hingeben sollten weil bislang wenige deutsche Studenten in Bachelor oder Master Studiengängen studieren. Um einer Wechsel zu kriegen befürwortet der Autor bessere Betreeungquote und finanzielle Ausstattung der Hochschulen. Die Darstellungform des Artikels erlaubt für ein erwogener Handlung von Reform und schafft eine klare Zeichnung der positiven und negativen Aspekten des Themas. Hinsichtlich der Verjüngungeffeckt vereinigt sich den Autor die Meinungen von Studenten, Lehren, und Experten durch Zitate. Uberrraschenderweise erfährt Deutschland immer noch eine beispiellos Veränderung in der Demographik der Studentbevolkerung, allerdings ohne Bildungsver-



Chapter 7.╇ FL writing as meaning-making 155

besserung, spezifische besseren Betreungsquote und finanzielle Ausstattung, ist die Verlängerung der Tendenz nicht moglich. Ein Mangel der Rücksicht zu den Humboltischen Ideal in der Promotion von Reform ist für mich notwendig, weil obwohl beiden die Studiendauer und das Alter der Studenten verkleinen sich, ist es immer möglich die Geisteswissenschaften und selbstbestimmen Studentenlebens weiterzumachen um stromlinienförmige Absolventen zu vermieden.

Appendix B: Translation (including attempts to capture infelicities of wording but not grammatical inaccuracies) The text “Erst pauken, dann Party” deals with the subject of rejuvenation at German universities. Jan-Martin Wirda, a prominent expert in educational matters for Die Zeit, reports on a critical assessment of the causes and effects of this phenomenon for German students and the overall culture of student life. This text represents a description of today’s system, in which the opinions of experts and also of students are contrasted against each other. In his talk the author supports his argument primarily with quotes from people, who have retained [received]an old-established interest in the topic. The text offers not only a thorough treatment of the rejuvenation effect but a clear presentation of the negative and positive consequences of this change. The author introduces the text with a series of statistics that show the declining age of university students, and he points to this societal trend as progress. In the following paragraph occur the necessary causes of the rejuvenation effect. The shortening of compulsory education, military and civilian service [reference to Germany’s draft and the option to fulfill the obligation through community service] in connection together with a shifting of the beginning of schooling to earlier on illustrate an enormous jump in comparison with earlier student generations. The author also points out that the Europe-wide harmonization becomes a fundamental reason for the rejuvenation effect. In addition, introduction of this structural unity [uniformity] through [throughout] Europe brings along the bachelor and master certificates, which have changed the general purpose of universities. After the author has treated the causes sufficiently expansively he turns to the consequences of the change in student culture. He compares the Humboldtian system [the 19th century ideal driving German higher education up to the most recent past], which emphasizes a self-determined student life, with the reformed system, in which studies become a stop along the way to grownup. Thereafter tuition fees are advocated, specifically the author was able to describe the expectation of personal attention to students in their studies. Although the increasing productivity orientation raises the efficiency of students, experts in the article explain that this increase is possible only when studying become more similar to jobs. The author concludes this part of his argument with a comparison with the USA. The student culture, which has long been the normal situation in the USA, has become more prominent in Germany. Finally, the author returns to his original claim about the rejuvenation effect and the general changes in student culture. He contrasts the negative aspects of streamlined graduates and the positive potential of a success story. Summarizing, he warns education policy makers that they should not succumb to an illusion because few German students up to this point are studying in bachelor or master’s courses of study. In order to get a change the author advocates better student care levels and financial resources of universities.

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The form of presentation of the article permits a balanced treatment of reform and creates a clear delineation of the positive and negative aspects of the subject. With regard to the rejuvenation process the author unites himself with the opinions of students, teachers, and experts by means of quotations. Surprisingly, Germany is still experiencing an unprecedented change in the demographics of the student population, however without improvement in education, particularly better levels of student care and financial allocation the extension of this tendency is not possible. A lack of consideration of the Humboldtian ideal in the promotion of reforms to me is necessary, because although the length of study and the age of students are becoming smaller it is always possible to continue on with the humanities and self-determined student life in order to avoid streamlined graduates. [This sentence is one of the few that were thoroughly rewritten in the second version of the summary.]

Appendix C: Coded version of the summary (with line numbering) Coding Bolding: verbal expressions of reporting, frequently collocations and extended phrases, which include various and often subtly overlapping forms of appraisal directed toward the content in terms of a particular proposition or bundles of propositions in the source text, or direct appraisal on the part of the FL summary writer, e.g., “befürworten”/adcovate UPPERCASE: grammatical metaphor, primarily deverbal, that condenses several propositions of the source text, again with frequent infusion of forms of appraisal, e.g., “EINSCHÄTZUNG“/ assessment, from „einschätzen“/assess, judge small caps: nouns condensing several propositions of the source text; sometimes “faded grammatical metaphors” (e.g., “Fortschritt” – advance, progress) or technical terms (e.g., “Argument”/argument). Frequently occurring close to grammatical metaphors because of certain syntactic pressures exerted by nominalization Single underlining: the entire noun phrase, including prenominal modification through adjectives and single postnominal expansions Double underlining: the entire noun phrase, including prenominal modification through adjectives and extensive postnominal expansion, often with multiple GM use, serialization of several nouns, and relative clauses 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Der Text „Erst pauken, dann Party“ befasst sich mit dem thema |Vergüngseffekt  auf deutschen Hochschulen. Jan-Martin Wiarda, ein bekannter Experte in  Bildungs|fragen für Die Zeit, nennt EINE kritische EINSCHÄTZUNG den Ursachen  und Auswirkungen dieses Phänomens auf deutschen Studenten und auf der allgemeinen  Studentenkultur. Bei diesem Text handelt es sich um eine BESCHREIBUNG des heutigen  Systems, in der DIE MEINUNGEN von Experten und auch Studenten miteinander kontrastieren werden. In seiner ANSPRACHE unterstütz den Verfasser sein  Argument vor allem mit Zitaten von Menschen, die ein altbegründetes Interesse auf dem  Thema erhalten. Der Text bietet nicht nur EINE eingehende BEHANDLUNG des

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51



Chapter 7.╇ FL writing as meaning-making 157 Vergüngseffekts sondern auch EINE klare DARSTELLUNG negativen und positiven  AUSWIRKUNGEN | dieser Änderung. Der Autor leitet den Text ein mit einen Reihen von Statistiken, die das neigende Alter  von Hochschulstudenten zeigt, und er weist auf dieser gesellschaftlichen Tendenz | als  Fortschritt hin. Im folgenden Abschnitt kommt die notwendigen ursachen des  Verjungüngseffekts vor. DIE VERKÃœRZUNG der Regelshulzeit, Wehr, und Zivildienst in  Zusammenhang zusammen mit EINER VERSCHIEBUNG des Schulbeginns nach vorne  illustriert EINE enorme SPRUNG| IM VERGLEICH ZU früheren Studentengenerationen. Der  Autor weist auch darauf hin, dass DIE europaweite HARMONISIERUNG eine grundlegende  Ursache des Verjungüngseffekts wird. Darüber hinaus bringt die Einführung dieser  strukturellen Einheit durch Europa die Bachelor und Master Zertifikate mit, die den  allgemeinen Zweck der Hochschulen geändert hat. Nachdem der Autor den Ursachen hinreichend ausführlich behandelt hat, wendet er sich die Auswirkungen | der Änderung der Studentenkultur zu. Er vergleicht das  Humboldtschen System, das ein selbstbestimmtes Studentenleben betont, mit der reformierten  System, in der das Studium | eine Zwischenstopp auf dem Weg zu Erwachsen wird.  Danach wird die Studiengebühren befürwortet, und zwar konnte den VERFASSER | die  ERWARTUNG | der persönlichen BETREUUNG von Studenten auf ihren Bildung  darstellen. Obwohl die zunehmende Leistungsorientierung erhebt die Effizienz von Studenten,  erklärt Experten im Artikel, dass dieser Ansieg nur möglich ist, wenn das Studium ähnlicher  wie ein Job wird. Der Autor beendet diesen Teil | seines Arguments mit einer  Vergleich zu den USA. Die Studentenkultur, die längst Normalfall in den USA ist, ist in  Deutschland prominentor geworden. Abschließend kehrt den Autor zu seiner ursprünglichen Behauptung über die  Verjüngungeffeckt und die allgemeinen Veränderungen des Studienkulturs zurück.  Er stellt die negativen Aspekten von stromlinienförmigen Absolventen und das positive  Potential von einer Erfolgsgeschichte gegenüber. Zusammenfassend warnt er die  Bildungspolitiker vor, dass sie sich einer Illusion nicht hingeben sollten weil bislang wenige  deutsche Studenten in Bachelor oder Master Studiengängen studieren. Um einer Wechsel zu kriegen befürwortet der Autor bessere Betreeungquote und finanzielle Ausstattung  der Hochschulen. Die Darstellungform des Artikels erlaubt für ein erwogener Handlung von  Reform und schafft eine klare Zeichnung der positiven und negativen Aspekten des  Themas. Hinsichtlich der Verjüngungeffeckt vereinigt sich den Autor die Meinungen  von Studenten, Lehren, und Experten durch Zitate. Uberrraschenderweise erfährt Deutschland  immer noch eine beispiellos Veränderung in der Demographik der Studentbevolkerung,  allerdings ohne Bildungs|verbesserung, spezifische besseren Betreungsquote und  finanzielle Ausstattung, ist die Verlängerung der Tendenz nicht moglich. Ein  Mangel der Rücksicht zu den Humboltischen Ideal in der Promotion von Reform ist für  mich notwendig, weil obwohl beiden die Studiendauer und das Alter der Studenten  verkleinen sich, ist es immer möglich die Geisteswissenschaften und selbstbestimmen  Studentenlebens weiterzumachen um stromlinienförmige Absolventen zu vermieden.

chapter 8

The language learning potential of form-focused feedback on writing Students’ and teachers’ perceptions Fiona Hyland

University of Hong Kong

This chapter uses a case study approach to look at students’ and teacher’s perceptions of the language learning potential of form-focused feedback on writing. It explores the ways in which motivated students used form-focused feedback on their writing by purposefully exploiting the opportunities for consciousness-raising, noticing and further practice that it provided. It is argued that feedback use was not a passive process of teachers giving feedback and students using it to correct their papers. Instead students were actively engaged in defining their own learning needs and deciding how the feedback could best be utilised to achieve their language learning goals. It is suggested that such active student participation and engagement is crucial if the language learning potential of feedback is to be fully exploited in learning-to-write contexts.

Introduction This chapter looks into the writing-to-learn dimension of writing in a learningto-write context by exploring the ways in which providing and making use of form-focused feedback can contribute to developing language competence in an additional language. Feedback is generally viewed as an important tool for scaffolding second language writing. In addition, the role of form-focused feedback in language learning has long been debated, both in terms of spoken and written language development. While there has been some research into student attitudes to feedback, their active participation and engagement with feedback and the individual differences in the strategies chosen by them to utilize feedback have not been examined in detail. This chapter will look at students’ engagement with feedback with the aim of showing how individual students’ beliefs and motivations influenced both the

160 Fiona Hyland

extent and depth of their processing of form-focused feedback and thus enhanced or limited its language learning potential. Using naturalistic longitudinal data, the chapter describes classroom-based research which examines students’ and teachers’ perceptions of the language learning potential of form-focused feedback on writing. It also considers the ways that students’ attitudes and perceptions affected their exploitation of this feedback. The chapter then focuses on two contrasting students and examines their engagement with the form-focused feedback over a complete course with the aim of showing (i) how the process of using form-focused feedback on writing could provide opportunities for consciousness-raising and noticing within a collaborative and supportive learning framework; and (ii) how such engagement with feedback had the potential to enhance not just students’ writing skills, but also their general language learning.

The role of form-focused feedback in second language acquisition The potential of feedback to raise consciousness and enhance noticing An important issue in second language learning relates to the role of feedback in the language learning process. Much of the debate has focused on the role of the negative evidence provided via feedback in developing implicit and explicit learning and the extent to which explicit knowledge gained from both teaching and correction can become implicit knowledge which can be utilised automatically and unconsciously in language production (Krashen 1982, 1993; Long 1983; Doughty 2001; Ellis 2002). One aspect of this debate has centred on the role of consciousness raising and noticing in the language learning process. Consciousness-raising involves drawing learners’ attention to the formal structure properties of the language. This can be done in various ways, for example, via direct teaching or through student engagement in a language activity, such as a consciousnessraising task (Ellis 2003). It can also be accomplished via the provision of feedback on a student’s writing. The explicit knowledge of the language gained from this may then be used to facilitate the process of ‘noticing’ or attending to form (Ellis 2003). Becoming aware of a feature, or noticing, is considered by some researchers to be a necessary condition for language learning (Schmidt 2001). It is argued that if second language writers notice the gap between their current performance and the target form, they may revise their texts and this act of hypothesis testing may help them to acquire the target form (see Chapter 4 this volume). In order for an aspect of the language to be noticed, however, students need to have their attention drawn to the problematic form and written feedback on a draft is one



Chapter 8.╇ The language learning potential of form-focused feedback 161

way of doing this. Thus it can be argued that feedback, combined with rewriting, has the potential to contribute to language learning, by facilitating the processes of consciousness raising, noticing and hypothesis testing.

The language learning potential of form-focused feedback  on second language writing There has been a heated debate about the contribution of explicit knowledge about language structures to language acquisition and whether explicit knowledge can actually become implicit knowledge. Krashen (1982, 1993) maintains that formfocused instruction can only affect explicit knowledge, not the acquisition of implicit knowledge. But other researchers such as De Keyser (1998) have argued that focus on form can speed up the acquisition of implicit knowledge and that explicit knowledge can evolve into implicit knowledge of the language through communicative practice. This debate is highly relevant to any consideration of the impact of explicit form- focused feedback, where discussion has centred on its potential to improve students’ language accuracy. Some researchers have claimed that feedback on error is both discouraging and generally fails to produce any improvements in students’ subsequent writing. For example, Truscott (1999, 2004, 2007) argues that writing teachers should adopt a ‘correction-free approach’ in their classrooms. However, teachers tend to resist such appeals, since they are aware that accuracy in writing is important for L2 writers, especially in academic and professional contexts. Truscott’s view (1996) that form-focused feedback is generally unhelpful and even harmful to students’ fluency, is countered by other researchers who argue that form-focused feedback can enhance students’ motivation. It is valued highly by students, who have consistently indicated in both surveys and interviews that they believe it is beneficial to their writing (Ferris & Roberts 2001; Hyland 1998; Leki 1991). This controversy is ongoing and is complicated by debates about research design issues about what could be considered a significant improvement and what constitutes a sufficient time frame for feedback to be considered as having a long term effect (see Bruton 2009). Nonetheless, many research studies have suggested that written feedback/correction on error can help learners to both improve their drafts and their longer term writing ability (Bitchener 2008; Bitchener & Knoch 2008; Chandler 2003, 2009; Ellis et al. 2008; Ferris 1999, 2004, 2006). Some studies suggest that feedback can be beneficial in the short-term revision of drafts. Ferris (1997) for example, found that 73% of grammar-focused teacher comments resulted in successful revisions while Ferris and Roberts (2001) found that of two groups of students offered different types of feedback, one group

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was able to successfully revise 60% of underlined grammatical errors and another group was able to revise 64% of such errors when they were both underlined and coded, but not corrected through feedback. In contrast, a group which revised without any feedback was able to self correct only 18% of their errors. The ability to make corrections immediately after feedback on a draft cannot be directly used as evidence of language learning, but there have also been studies which have looked at longer-term development after feedback. For instance, Chandler (2003) used an experimental design with two groups, both receiving corrective feedback on their errors. However, the experimental group was required to revise each assignment, correcting all the errors highlighted by feedback, before submitting the next assignment, whereas the control group were not required to do corrections. The study showed that the error rate in the student writing over ten weeks improved significantly more if the students were required to correct their errors immediately than if they were not. Similarly, Bitchener (2008) reports on a longitudinal study which found that students who received written corrective feedback on English articles outperformed a control group who received no feedback on tests over a period of two months. Ellis et al. (2008) also looked at the effects of written corrective feedback on articles and found gains in student performance after feedback in both immediate and delayed post tests, suggesting that for some fairly straightforward grammatical items such as articles, corrective feedback could be effective. Despite these research findings, there is room for further research. In this respect, a useful distinction has been made between “feedback for accuracy” and “feedback for acquisition” (Manchón In press, this volume). Most of the studies quoted above have focused on the former but, as Manchón argues, feedback which is aimed at promoting language learning (as opposed to just improving short term accuracy) needs to be specifically designed to engage L2 writers in deeper processing through, for instance, the processes of noticing and reflection. Most studies to date have not really considered this distinction. In addition, we also need to be cautious when making claims about the relationship between feedback, revision, and language learning since there are many complex contextual factors which need to be taken into account. In this respect, Goldstein (2001) points out that research into feedback has mostly ignored its interactive and social dimensions. This suggests that there is a need to look more closely at form-focused feedback use by individual students in its naturally occurring context of real classrooms and complex teacher-student relationships developing over a period of time. In addition, as Lantolf & Pavlenko (2001) remind us, learners are



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more than processing devices that convert linguistic input into well-formed (or not so well-formed) outputs. They need to be understood as people, which in turn means we need to appreciate their human agency. As agents, learners actively engage in constructing the terms and conditions of their learning.  (Lantolf & Pavlenko 2001:â•›145)

In short, while there is still much debate about where exactly to focus feedback and whether form-focused feedback makes a difference to students, little of this research focuses on the students as purposeful and active participants in their own learning and considers their perceptions of the language learning potential of the feedback and how these may influence their actual use of feedback. Using data from a previous study looking at the effects of written feedback on ESL students and their texts over a complete course, in this chapter I will focus on teacher and student perceptions of the value of form-focused feedback and also to consider how students engaged with it with the aim of language learning. The research is guided by the following questions: 1. Was feedback on form an important focus for teacher feedback? 2. What were the teachers’ beliefs about form-focused feedback and its language learning potential? 3. What were the students’ beliefs about the role and value of form-focused feedback in their language learning? 4. How did the students engage with the form-focused feedback given on their writing?

Method Research context and approach The study looked at students and teachers on an English proficiency course running for fourteen weeks at a university in New Zealand. As part of this programme, three to four hours a week were spent in class on writing activities, usually through a workshop approach, which involved teacher and peer feedback and revision and resubmission of drafts. A case study approach was considered most appropriate for this research because case study methodology offered the potential for focus on the behaviours of individual writers using a variety of sources of feedback in a classroom context. As Ellis (2006:â•›365) has pointed out there is a need for more classroom-based research investigating form-focused feedback.

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Setting and participants Two classes were observed throughout the semester: one class preparing students for undergraduate studies (Class A), with Joan as their teacher, and one class preparing them for postgraduate studies (Class B) with Nadia as their teacher. Both teachers were experienced EFL/ESL teachers who had taught a considerable number of similar writing courses. Six students (three from each class) were approached and asked to participate in the research. These students were given pseudonyms to ensure anonymity. In class A participants included Keith from Taiwan, Maho from Japan, and Seng Hee from Korea. Their language proficiency level as measured by the university’s own placement tests varied from low to mid intermediate. In group B participants included Zhang from China and two female students, Liang from Taiwan, and Samorn from Thailand. Their language proficiency ranged from intermediate to advanced level.

Data collection This study aimed to look at feedback in its naturally occurring contexts and therefore the teachers were asked to give feedback as they normally did on these courses and no external interventions were implemented. Writing workshops in the two classes were observed each week during which field notes were taken. I interviewed students three times; in the first week, around week seven, and at the end of the course. The teachers were also interviewed and they were asked to conduct think-aloud protocols as they gave written feedback to the draft of one piece of writing for each participant. Retrospective interviews with the students were then carried out, within a day of their revising of these drafts, focusing on their revision strategies and their responses to the written feedback, using their drafts and the feedback they received as a stimulus. The written data collected consisted of all student writing (drafts and final versions) and feedback related to it. This included both weekly timed test writing and assignment writing. In Class A students received teacher feedback on 10 pieces of writing, and in Class B they received feedback on 7 pieces of writing. The data collection methods and data obtained are summarised in Table 1 below.

Data analysis All the written interventions made by the teacher on each student’s text were identified. These included comments, underlining or other marks and corrections.



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Table 1.╇ Different types and sources of data collected Data collection

Data obtained

Student writing

Drafts and final versions of writing (7–10 pieces of writing per case study student) Weekly test writing Student journal entries

Related feedback

Written feedback including interventions on text Longer comments in margins and end of writing Separate feedback sheets (peer and teacher feedback)

Course documents

Including teaching materials, assignment topics, course  outlines and guidelines

Class observation fields notes

All writing workshops in both classes – 10 each in total

Pre and post course student interviews

Semi-structured interviews focusing on student beliefs and practices about writing and the usefulness of different types of feedback

Teacher interviews

Semi-structured interviews focusing on teacher beliefs and practices concerning teaching writing and giving different types of feedback

Teacher think-aloud protocols

Carried out as they responded to one draft for each student

Student retrospective interviews Carried out after they revised the same draft after receiving feedback

Each written intervention which focused on a separate aspect of the student text was then categorized as a ‘feedback point’ and the total number of feedback points for each piece of writing was calculated. For the purpose of this study, all the feedback points that focused on form and error correction were then identified and counted. Both teachers used a set of codes for showing form-related problems, but they often supplemented this with comments in the margin, complete corrections and generalised comments at the end of the essay. The range of feedback options used varied from simple circling or underlining of mistakes to complete corrections of errors. The teachers did not always use the codes consistently and their protocols showed that they tended to supply complete corrections if they judged individual students would have problems correcting the language on their own. They also sometimes found it hard to clearly diagnose a problem in language the students would understand and therefore resorted to complete reformulation or correction for more complex grammatical problems. Some longer comments on language problems were also given either on a summary sheet, at the end of the writing, or in the margin. All these were considered as feedback points focused

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Table 2.╇ Feedback focusing on form: percentages of total feedback offered over the course for all case studies (as previously reported in Hyland 2003) Student Class A Maho ╛Seng Hee ╛Keith Class B Samorn ╛Liang ╛Zhang

Total feedback points

Feedback points focused on form

420 376 633 333 236 141

â•‹257 (61.2%) â•‹219 (58.2%) â•‹476 (75.2%) â•‹242 (72.7%) â•‹145 (61.4%) 74 (56%)

on form. To help ensure reliability and consistency, the feedback for one student was also analysed by another researcher and areas of disagreement were discussed until an agreement rate of over 90% was reached.

Results and discussion Was feedback on form an important focus for teacher feedback? Table 2 shows the total number of feedback points given for each case study over the complete course on both drafts and final versions of writing. It also shows the percentage of the total feedback offered which focused on form. The amount of feedback given to individual students shows a great deal of variation and there is also considerable variation in terms of the amount of feedback offered on form. This may be partly explained by the higher language level of students in Class B, and may also be affected by both the teachers responding to students’ requests for specific types of feedback on their cover sheets submitted with assignments. For all students however, more than half the feedback offered to them focused on form, suggesting that this was an important focus for the two teachers.

What were the teachers’ beliefs about form-focused feedback  and its language learning potential? The amount of form-focused feedback given to the students is quite surprising as neither of the two teachers appeared to believe that a focus on form was a primary concern when giving feedback. Nadia adopted a process approach to teaching writing and told me in her interview that she worried that the students often became obsessed with grammar:



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(1) … they get terribly bogged down with grammar. You know and they get very upset and worked up that grammatically there’s something wrong with their writing. … So I think that’s the biggest problem that they tend to concentrate on little bits of it, structured bits of it like grammar and so on, and forget that an essay is actually about communication and communicating content and communicating ideas.

Considering this, it seemed contradictory that Nadia often used the phrase ‘fix it up’ in her instructions and suggestions to the students in her writing workshops. She told me that she saw the workshops as giving students the chance ‘to fix it up’ before handing their writing in. Her stated concern was with the production of readerly writing, but her instructions to the students and her interactions with them in writing workshops seemed to focus more on discrete language problems. A discussion on this point revealed that she felt that there was no contradiction in this aspect of her feedback. She believed that both focuses were necessary, but the focus on the whole had to come before the focus on the discrete points. Joan was most concerned with genre and academic issues when giving feedback because she saw her main role as being to impart knowledge of academic writing and believed that comments on these areas would have more impact than form-focused feedback: (2) [The most useful comments] … are the most generalisable ones that have the widest use – the ones on organisation and academic conventions. The same sort of things apply to most pieces of academic writing, whereas if you are looking at a grammar point it’s more sort of incremental, you know, sort of gradually making the language more correct.

Despite this, we can also see from Table 2 that a large proportion of Joan’s feedback focused on the accuracy of the students’ texts. Neither teacher thought form-focused feedback would be likely to have any positive results; both thought it could be harmful to the students’ self esteem. Neither thought that they over-focused on grammar; they both described themselves as being primarily concerned with meaning and organisation of ideas. However, they both worried that the students were too concerned with grammatical and mechanical issues.

What were the students’ beliefs about the role and value of form-focused feedback in their language learning? In contrast to the teachers’ views, form-focused feedback was extremely important to most of the students who felt it should be one of the main areas addressed

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by teacher feedback. Their attitudes towards it were quite complex though. For example, Samorn said this form of feedback was the one she “loved the most” but she seemed willing to be assign a quite passive role to herself in terms of using it: (3) The teacher give me the feedback, it’s one that I love most because I know that I have several things that I have to be corrected. I think that a sentence I’m using in my writing is strange because I think it come out from my mind, from my brain, from what I speak … So I would like teacher to change it in this – in the structure of the sentence and in my grammar also.

The students were sometimes disappointed about the amount of form-focused feedback given and asked teachers to be more “serious” about language feedback as indicated in this extract from Zhang’s interview. He wanted detailed – he termed it “serious” – feedback which corrected his mistakes and told him his problems and also what progress he had made and he contrasted this with “useless” comments on his ideas, like “it’s interesting.” (4) In fact the teacher should try their best to be patient, to be more serious. The students they think very much about the teacher’s feedback. If the teacher always not serious, the students will be feel very disappointed.

Although five of the six students emphasised the importance of this form-focused feedback, none of them believed form-focused feedback on their writing would improve their long-term language accuracy immediately, but they argued that constant repetition and correction would eventually have an impact. They all felt that they needed to have their errors pointed out to them so they would notice them and that this would help them to consolidate their language learning over€time: (5) Next week you have the same knowledge because nobody tell you the last time, this is correct, this is fault. Nothing improve, I think. (Samorn) (6) I think the teacher should be patient. I may make this kind of mistakes many, many times. The teacher should correct my mistakes each time I make it. I think repetition helps people. Especially for people who are adults. (Zhang) (7) However make mistakes inevitably, but it doesn’t matter, because you can from every time improve your writing, maybe once, twice, third time you will correct your errors. (Keith) (8) If you correct me once I may forget that time, and the next time and the next time. But the teacher should keep correcting me and sometime I will remember. (Liang)



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These students felt that form-focused feedback was particularly necessary on drafts since this would make salient those language areas where there were problems: (9) It is even more important for the teacher to give feedback to the students when they finish their draft … because for me when I write my draft I don’t think very carefully, just write what I’m thinking. I don’t pay enough attention to sometimes grammar or organisation … When you write a draft, your weak points may come out easily, but when you write more formally, very carefully, you may make less mistakes. (Zhang)

While all six students admitted that they liked having language errors corrected completely, they recognised that they might learn more by actively participating in the process of correction. Five of them felt that the method of correction used in this course of highlighting problems with underlining and then using a coding system to indicate the problematic aspect was ideal for language learning, as it forced them to think for themselves about how to carry out the correction, i.e. it helped them to reflect and develop their meta-linguistic awareness of problems with aspects of their language. Seng Hee suggested that complete correction was not a good idea because if the teacher corrected her mistakes “maybe it’s not very help me because I didn’t think how can I correct this? If I make a correction myself, I will have a deep impression and I won’t make the same in the future. I can memorise them well if I do it myself ”. Liang also felt this type of correction forced her to confront her problems herself and then allowed her to take them up with the teacher in the workshops if necessary: “I can think this my mistake and think why, what’s the problem with this mistake and if I cannot say, I can ask my teacher.” Maho, who was the only student who did not value feedback on language accuracy, was also the only student who argued for complete correction. She saw this as an efficiency issue. She preferred teachers “to correct properly, not just show me the area because it’s easier”. She believed that it depends on “personality or way of learning but for me correct perfectly is better for me because I can understand very quickly what I was wrong”. Unlike the other students who focused on the potential of feedback for learning, this appeared to be all that she wanted from the feedback – to show her where she was wrong, rather than to help her develop her language skills. All the students felt that for form-focused feedback to have the most impact, the ideal would be form-focused feedback on a draft with a follow-up discussion in workshops where the two-way collaborative dialogue would help to clarify problematic issues and might also lead to better long term memory retention:

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(10) You can get the answer easily. Sometimes you think a lot about how to make a sentence and it takes you a long time, but when you ask somebody they can tell you exactly what you want…. It will be a teacher in my mind and next time if I would like to speak a sentence like this I can remember well that. (Samorn) (11) I ask this question maybe I can have another question, but if she write, if I have question again I can’t ask, but while I’m talking I can ask. (Seng Hee) (12) We can exchange, the teacher can tell me what I should do and when I do not understand I can ask questions. (Zhang)

Keith suggested that written corrective feedback was the major influence in deciding what he would focus on during workshops. He tried to correct the problems raised by feedback by himself first, but he also used the discussion with the teacher to ask about ones he had not been able to solve.

How did the students engage with the form-focused feedback  given on their writing? To look more closely at students’ use of the form-focused feedback, I will examine the three pieces of writing which students carried out involving writing a draft, receiving teacher written feedback and then writing a revised version. Changes were identified between the drafts and final versions of these three assignments. These changes were then cross-referenced to the feedback points given on the drafts to determine whether the revisions were related to the feedback and to see if the students were able to carry out these revisions successfully. Gauging success was quite problematic, as students sometimes were only partially able to identify and correct language problems. To help ensure reliability, the revisions were also analysed by another researcher, areas of disagreement and ambiguity were discussed, and final agreement on whether the revisions were successful was reached. Table 3 shows the number of form-focused feedback points given to each student on their drafts and the number of revisions which could be related to feedback points and the success of these revisions. There is considerable variation in the students’ use of the form-focused feedback, with Keith, Samorn and Liang using a very high proportion of the feedback they were offered and Zhang, Maho and Seng Hee using less. Maho also received much less form-related feedback on her drafts, despite being of lower language proficiency than most of the other case study students. A closer look at the students’ writing and their interviews may offer an explanation for this. Both Zhang and Seng Hee revised their drafts quite extensively, cutting large sections of their



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Table 3.╇ Feedback offered on drafts and related revisions on focused on form  (as previously reported in Hyland 2003) Student

Class A Maho â•›Seng Hee â•›Keith Class B Samorn â•›Liang â•›Zhang

No. of form-focused feedback points offered on drafts

No. of related-revisions on redrafted essays

% of successful revisions

â•⁄ 20 â•⁄ 31 148 187 â•⁄ 65 â•⁄ 29

â•⁄â•⁄ 2 (10%) â•⁄ 23 (74%) 121 (82%) 152 (81%) â•⁄ 58 (89%) â•⁄ 18 (62%)

â•⁄â•⁄ 2 (100%) â•⁄ 17 (74%) â•⁄ 91 (75%) 126 (83%) â•⁄ 50 (86%) â•⁄ 16 (88%)

original drafts out, and this meant that some of the feedback could not be used. This does not mean that they were deliberately seeking to avoid engaging with the teacher’s feedback. Discussions in the retrospective interviews and analysis of texts, suggested that avoidance as a strategy was used only twice by Seng Hee and once by Zhang in these three pieces of work. Maho’s different revision pattern is also interesting. As already noted, Maho preferred feedback which focused on her ideas and was much less enthusiastic than the other students about the potential for learning from feedback on language problems. In her interview she told me that improving her language accuracy was not one of her main aims and she was happy to ignore form-focused teacher feedback. She made very major changes to her drafts, as she viewed a draft mostly as a way of generating ideas about a topic. After Maho discussed this strategy with her teacher, Joan decided that she would focus her feedback on drafts mainly on organisation and development of ideas rather than form, reserving her form-focused feedback for final versions of essays, where she felt it might be more useful. Table 3 also shows that the students were mainly successful in carrying out the revisions after receiving the feedback, although there is some variation here too. This may be partly due to differences in the nature of their errors and the level of the students. Another factor may have been help from others outside the formal learning context. Students followed the normal practice on the course of receiving feedback and taking their drafts away to revise. Interviews and discussions with the students indicated that at least three of them used spouses, friends and flatmates as informants to help them revise their assignments after feedback. This did not mean they wanted to get someone else to ‘fix-up’ their writing for them. Liang saw her conversations with her husband about her writing as a valuable language learning opportunity. She believed that the interaction offered potential for collaboration and negotiation of meaning:

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(13) Sometimes I have good ideas, but I cannot explain very well in English. My husband can give me advices to improve my writing. I always discuss some sentences with my husband and he teaches me grammar. In this way, I think I can improve my English ability. I like this kind of feedback. I can have more ideas about my essay during the discussion. (Journal entry)

Students like Liang are not passive recipients of feedback, but active participants in their own learning who have developed their own strategies for using teacher form-focused feedback and are aware of its learning potential and its limitations. In fact Liang felt very frustrated when her teacher discouraged her from using her husband as a source of feedback because Liang saw the dialogue which evolved around her writing in these discussions as an important learning opportunity. Her views would be supported by processing theory which suggests that language acquisition is enhanced when the mental activity that learners are engaged in causes them to go beyond the input and by claims that interaction allows for a deeper level of cognitive processing (Ellis & Fotos 1999).

Contrasts in individual students’ engagement with feedback To more fully understand the relationship between the feedback and its impact on students’ language learning, we need to look more closely at the specific actions taken by individual students to engage with the feedback. One of the most interesting examples concerns the case of Keith, who highly valued feedback for its longer-term language learning potential. His case will be discussed in more detail below and will be compared with the case of Maho, who (as we have already seen) did not engage with form-focused feedback.

Keith: “Learning a language involves being energetic” Keith was a Taiwanese student in his late twenties. His language proficiency was rated as low to mid-intermediate by tests at the beginning of this course. Keith’s biggest sources of frustration when writing were his grammatical inaccuracies and his problems with sentence structure. At the start of this course, Keith already had some very carefully thought out ideas about feedback. He believed that the teacher’s main role should be to correct mistakes in grammar, “correct my weaknesses.” As a second language writer, this was crucial for him. Keith liked the method of correcting used on this course where his teacher underlined errors and indicated the nature of the problem with symbols. He believed that this system meant he was more likely to remember the correction and less likely to make the same mistake again.



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When faced with feedback on his language problems, Keith liked to “ask my classmates or the teacher what the problem is.” For him language learning involved being “energetic”: “If you don’t open your mouth, you won’t know the answers”. (14) Feedback depends on yourself. Even if the feedback is very detailed … if you won’t use the feedback, you won’t ask the questions, you couldn’t correct your errors.

At the end of the course, he suggested that feedback had been the main factor which had helped him to improve both his language and his writing. He used it to decide what to focus on when doing practice exercises in grammar books in the Self access centre, and also found it useful for vocabulary problems, giving him advice about “the way in which I can use the correct words.” Keith used his form-focused feedback in a very systematic way. He described how he usually responded to feedback: (15) I saw the signal and then I checked in the book … And then I checked in the dictionary. If I have another question I will ask my teacher and then I will practise again in my practice book.

The “practice book” was a self-initiated strategy and consisted of a book in which he wrote down how to use words or phrases which he had used incorrectly in his writing, with corrected sentences. He reported that he often went back and looked at this book and always consulted it before beginning a new piece of writing. In previous language learning courses he had not corrected all the mistakes in his writing, but he had found that he was not making the progress he wanted to: “I think for a long time, in the past maybe the same errors I will happen in the future. Why I couldn’t correct it from the feedback from teachers?” He therefore decided to adopt this more methodical approach, designed to make his errors more salient and to encourage deeper processing. Keith believed that this systematic and deliberate use of feedback was one of the major factors in his improvement and was “one hundred percent” convinced that written feedback had improved his writing over the course, especially the feedback on grammatical problems. Keith changed his mind about the relative importance of feedback on final versions of writing and drafts over the period of this course. At the beginning he reported paying more attention to feedback on final pieces of writing. He explained that he regarded the first draft as just a rough version, while the final writing had all the ideas and organisation completed. The feedback would show “the real mistakes in there”, so he paid more careful attention to it. However, at the end of the course, Keith suggested that he found feedback on a draft more helpful because he had a chance to rewrite it. Since the draft was a rough version of his

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writing, it would contain more errors and feedback allowed him to correct these errors and learn from them. Thus Keith’s view of the role of feedback became more developmental as this course progressed. In a piece of writing entitled ‘The good language learner’, Keith wrote that he believed that the most important factors for success in language learning were to be active and to be an extrovert. He was therefore prepared to experiment widely with new vocabulary and structures. As we have seen, he believed that making mistakes, both in speaking and writing, was an essential part of the learning process. However, his attempts to try out complex structures and new vocabulary led to severe comprehension problems on the part of his teacher and she suggested that he should be less adventurous. Keith partially took this advice on board and simplified his sentence structures, but he believed he was extending his learning by trying out new structures and vocabulary in his writing and getting feedback on how successful this was. He therefore continued to adopt this active approach to using feedback, following his own strategies to try to maximise his learning from his writing. In their paper on form-focused feedback on oral production, Lyster and Ranta (1997) argue that students’ active engagement in the learning process is an important part of the language learning process. Such active engagement involves either negotiation of form, or happens when students have to consider and respond to the teacher’s feedback in some way. Keith’s case shows that active engagement may also be important for written as well as spoken language. An examination of Keith’s writing, both final versions and drafts, combined with his interviews and observations of his behaviour in the writing workshops suggest that he made concerted and sustained attempts to engage with all the form-focused feedback not just to improve his writing, but also, through his writing book, to commit the language points into his memory for future use. He was focused on noticing his errors, then engaging actively with the feedback in order to encourage deeper processing of the language points, which might lead to language learning. An examination of Keith’s weekly test writing indicates some very gradual improvement in terms of control of sentence structure over the whole course and although final tests at the end of the course suggested that Keith’s writing was still some way from his goals, he did improve his grades, both in writing and speaking, and most importantly he felt very satisfied with his progress and believed that his strategies were working. He said he was now “very proud” of his sentence structures.

Maho: “I just write, write, write and I pick up my idea and use it and make essay” Maho provides an interesting contrast to Keith. Her proficiency level was similar to Keith’s, but her pattern of use of feedback was unique among the students.



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We have already seen that she differed in her beliefs about the importance of form-Â�focused feedback and her use of it. Although she had many language-related problems, comments responding to ideas were much more valuable to her. She felt that if the teacher gave comments like “I agree with you”, or “I don’t think so”, which showed interest in her ideas; this would make doing her next writing assignment more ‘enjoyable’. She described how, as she wrote, she thought about the teacher reading and responding to her writing. This type of response made her “feel better. It’s more enjoyable to write if someone enjoys my writing.” Maho did not view grammatical accuracy as one of her major writing problems, although it concerned Joan who often focused on accuracy issues in her summative comments. Maho expressed frustration at the way her language ability failed to keep up with her thoughts: “I have some ideas and I can’t, I can make it in my language or in my opinions, but I can’t write down correctly.” It is interesting that Maho did not see this as a grammar problem. In fact, in both her interviews she said that grammar was not a serious problem for her and not something she ever focused on when reading feedback. She made no further use of the considerable amount of form-focused feedback on her final versions and as we saw from Table 2, the small amount of form-focused feedback she received on drafts was also largely unused. This seems to have been due to her writing strategies. Her focus on the meaning issues in her texts meant that for her drafts were essentially a way of writing herself into a topic and helping her to develop and generate ideas. This meant very substantial changes were made to drafts, and form-focused feedback generally became irrelevant and was ignored. Major structural and textual changes of the types carried out by Maho are often seen as characteristic of ‘expert’ writers. However unlike Keith, Maho tended to minimise her quite serious language problems and rarely engaged with the considerable feedback offered her in these areas. An examination of her final piece of writing done under test conditions reveals persistent sentence structure problems hamper the reader’s ability to follow the argument and she failed to pass this test. She then enrolled to repeat the course and subsequently failed again. So despite being a keen and very motivated writer, Maho made very little overall progress, either in her written or general language ability, suggesting that a focus solely on meaning-related revision did not lead to any tangible language learning gains. It seems then, that individual students varied quite considerably both in terms of their attitudes and their uses of form-focused feedback. Izumi and Bigelow (2000:â•›270) see individual variation as “problematic” for experimental research studies investigating form-focused feedback. Participants in their study varied greatly in terms of the attention they gave to grammar while processing input and this impacted on their results. The contrast between Keith and Maho’s use of corrective feedback also illustrates this variation and suggests the need for

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more qualitative research to explore individual differences in engagement and attention, since such differences obviously have a great impact on the potential of feedback for enhancing language learning. The students in this study generally highly valued form-focused feedback and were disappointed if it failed to meet their expectations. Form was a major concern for nearly all of them in their writing. Adopting a correction-free approach, as advocated by Truscott, would have had a very detrimental impact on student motivation. More importantly, these students wanted feedback on form, not to “fix-up” their texts but because it gave them a chance to test out their hypotheses about language in a situation where they would be able to get feedback on their success or failure and get help on points on points of uncertainty. This active, risktaking strategy was employed by the case study subjects quite deliberately, and is an aspect of the student involvement with their own improvement in writing which has not been widely considered. The idea that L2 students are over-focused on grammatical aspects of their texts is a common theme in the literature on L2 writing. Some have seen this as students assigning a limited role to the teacher and their feedback (Radecki & Swales 1988). However most of the students here did not see this as a limited role, rather they saw feedback which focused on language accuracy as important for their language development and hence an essential focus of teacher feedback. They valued such feedback for its consciousness-raising potential and they valued the opportunities to discuss the feedback in the workshops as an important opportunity for interactive collaborative learning. Feedback was seen as very important by the teachers. The interviews and the observations of their workshops indicated that they viewed feedback as embedded in a larger framework which included all aspects of the classroom context: instruction, conversations and writing conferences as well as interactions with peers. They gave large amounts of feedback to the students and invested a great deal of time and energy on responding to student writing. They designed their own feedback sheets or adapted those used by others. They tried to integrate their feedback with their teaching programmes and to make their workshop sessions as productive as possible. They asked students to tell them the kind of feedback they wanted and encouraged self evaluation and peer response to supplement the teacher feedback. However both teachers seemed much less convinced about the longer term benefits of form-focused feedback than the students. Neither teacher thought that correction would help students much. They also concurred with Truscott’s view that such correction could be harmful. They believed that corrections were judgmental and they worried about the students becoming too concerned with grammatical and mechanical issues and losing sight of what Nadia termed ‘the whole’.



Chapter 8.╇ The language learning potential of form-focused feedback 177

Students like Keith and Liang saw form-focused feedback in a different light. This may have been partly, as Leki (1991) suggests, because of their past experiences, but they also welcomed such feedback for its potential role in their language development, since it allowed them to test out their hypotheses about language and get feedback on their performance which they believed would eventually lead to learning. Most of the students not only valued the feedback they received, they also developed strategies to use it to improve their drafts and also as a way of actively testing and extending their language knowledge. However the potential for language learning from such feedback appeared to vary from student to student, due to differences in students’ approaches to writing and their major goals and objectives. These impacted on the extent to which they were prepared to engage with the feedback and use it as a tool for learning in conjunction with other language learning strategies such Keith’s vocabulary practice book and Liang’s discussions with her husband. Such activities may well have encouraged a greater depth of processing and would, it could be argued, be more likely to lead to language learning. I think it is also important that these strategies and activities for engaging with the feedback were self-initiated and motivation was therefore very strong.

Conclusion This study is based on only six case studies so it is difficult to draw any generalisable conclusions. Nonetheless, I would argue that the data obtained can be useful in understanding the writing-to-learn dimension of L2 writing practice in learning-to-write instructional settings. More precisely, the study shows how form-focused feedback can be a useful tool for language learning when given to active and engaged learners who are willing to utilise its potential to encourage a deeper processing of the formal aspects of the language. However, motivation and the students’ learning goals will impact on the extent to which individual students are prepared to do this and some may not be willing, as is illustrated by the case of Maho, whose views on writing lead her to focus on other goals and to ignore the form-focused feedback she was offered. Although the teachers in this study assigned a more limited role to form-focused feedback than the students did, they gave a great deal of form focused feedback to students. The study suggests that teachers should take time to find out their students’ perspectives on the value of form-focused feedback on writing and open up a dialogue to find out how they are currently using it. To ensure that their feedback becomes “feedback for acquisition” rather than “feedback for accuracy” (Manchón in press), teachers could also focus on raising students’ awareness of writing and revision strategies which

178 Fiona Hyland

would maximize the opportunities for noticing, reflection and deeper processing of language points via form-focused feedback.

References Bitchener, J. 2008. Evidence in support of corrective feedback. Journal of Second Language Writing 17: 102–118. Bitchener, J. & Knoch, U. 2008. The value of written corrective feedback for migrant and international students. Language Teaching Research 12: 409–431. Bruton, A. 2009. Designing research into the effects of grammar correction in L2 writing: Not so straightforward. Journal of Second Language Writing 18(2): 136–140. Chandler, J. 2003. The efficacy of various kinds of error correction for improvement of the accuracy and fluency of L2 student writing. Journal of Second Language Writing 12: 267–296. Chandler, J. 2009. Response to Truscott. Journal of Second Language Writing 18: 57–58. DeKeyser, R. 1998. Beyond focus on form: Cognitive perspectives on learning and practicing second language grammar. In Focus on Form in Classroom Language Acquisition, C.€Doughty & J. Williams (eds), 42–63. Cambridge: CUP. Doughty, C. 2001. Cognitive underpinnings of focus on form. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, P. Robinson (ed.), 206–257. Cambridge: CUP. Ellis, R. 2002. Does form-focused instruction affect the acquisition of implicit knowledge? A review of the research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 24: 223–236. Ellis, R. 2003. Task-based Language Learning and Teaching. Oxford: OUP. Ellis, R. 2006. Current issues in the teaching of grammar: An SLA perspective. TESOL Quarterly 40: 83–106. Ellis, R. & Fotos, S. 1999. Learning a Second Language Through Interaction. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ellis, R., Sheen, Y., Murakami, M. & Takashima, T. 2008. The effects of focused and unfocused written corrective feedback in an English as a foreign language context. System 36: 353– 371. Ferris, D. R. 1997. The influence of teacher commentary on student revision. TESOL Quarterly 31: 315–339. Ferris, D. R. 1999. The case for grammar correction in L2 writing classes: A response to Truscott. Journal of Second Language Writing 8: 1–12. Ferris, D. R. 2004. The ‘grammar correction’ debate in L2 writing: Where are we, and where do we go from here? (and what do we do in the meantime …?). Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 49–62. Ferris, D. R. 2006. Does error feedback help student writers? New evidence on the short- and long-term effects of written error correction. In Feedback in Second Language Writing: Contexts and Issues, K. Hyland & F. Hyland (eds), 81–104. Cambridge: CUP. Ferris, D. R. & Roberts, B. 2001. Error feedback in L2 writing classes: How explicit does it need to be? Journal of Second Language Writing 10: 161–184. Goldstein, L. 2001. For Kyla: What does the research say about responding to ESL writers. In On Second Language Writing, T. Silva & P. Matsuda (eds), 73–90. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.



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Hyland, F. 1998. The impact of teacher written feedback on individual writers. Journal of Second Language Writing 7(3): 255–286. Hyland, F. 2003. Focusing on form: Student engagement with teacher feedback. System 31(2): 217–230. Izumi, S. & Bigelow, M. 2000. Does output promote noticing and second language acquisition? TESOL Quarterly 34: 239–278. Krashen, S. 1982. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: Pergamon. Krashen, S. 1993. The effect of grammar teaching: Still peripheral. TESOL Quarterly 27: 717– 725. Lantolf, J. & Pavlenko, A. 2001. (S)econd (L)anguage (A)ctivity theory: Understanding second language learners as people. In Learner Contributions to Language Learning: New Directions in Research, M. P. Breen (ed.), 141–158. London: Longman. Leki, I. 1991. The preferences of ESL students for error correction in college level writing classes. Foreign Language Annals 24: 203–218. Long, M. 1983. Does second language instruction make a difference? A review of the research. TESOL Quarterly 17: 359–382. Lyster, R. & Ranta, L. 1997. Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 19: 37–66. Manchón, M. In press. The language learning potential of writing in foreign language contexts: Lessons from research. In Foreign Language Writing. Research Insights, M. Reichelt & T.€Chimasko (eds). West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Radecki, P. M. & Swales, J. M. 1988. ESL student reaction to written comments on their written work. System 16: 355–365. Schmidt, R. 2001. Attention. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, P. Robinson (ed.), 3–32. Cambridge: CUP. Truscott, J. 1996. The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning 46: 327–369. Truscott, J. 1999. The case for ‘the case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes’. A response to Ferris. Journal of Second Language Writing 8: 111–122. Truscott, J. 2004. Evidence and conjecture on the effects of correction: A response to Chandler. Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 337–343. Truscott, J. 2007. The effect of error correction on learners’ ability to write accurately. Journal of Second Language Writing 16: 255–272.

chapter 9

Writing to learn in FL contexts Exploring learners’ perceptions of the language learning potential of L2 writing Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios University of Murcia, Spain

The study reported in this chapter set out to investigate 18 EFL learners’ own perceptions of the language learning potential of L2 writing, and the actions they reported taking to make the most of the learning opportunities afforded by their engagement with writing. Data for the study came from self-reflection journals and in-depth semi-structured interviews conducted at two points in time 9 months apart. Our results shed light on the role played by self-initiated and teacher-led noticing processes and associated learning actions, extensive and challenging output practice, and the availability of tailor-made formÂ�focused instruction in bringing about learning through writing. The participants’ own perceptions of the language learning potential of writing was also found to be both a powerful motivating factor in their literacy experience and one of the goals that guided their writing activity. Several implications of these findings for future research will be discussed.

Introduction The research reported in this chapter intends to contribute to the growing body of empirical evidence on the language learning potential of written output practice. The study is part of a larger research project on the language learning potential (LLP) of composition writing in a context in which learning-to-write and writingto-learn concerns were present. The study explored our participants’ perceptions of the LLP afforded by the writing they were asked to do in an EAP course that was part of their degree studies, as well as their reported actions (self-initiated or teacher-led) to make the most of the language learning opportunities afforded by their engagement with writing tasks and activities. We start by briefly reviewing previous scholarly work in the area.

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Previous research on the language learning potential of L2 writing As discussed in Chapter 4, Cumming (1990) was among the first to acknowledge the potential role that writing, particularly composition writing, can have in the expansion and consolidation of L2 knowledge. His 1990 exploratory study analyzed the linguistic processing that a group of 23 adult Francophone ESL learners engaged in while composing under think-aloud conditions. More specifically, Cumming aimed to describe his participants’ metalinguistic and ideational thinking, assess whether the frequency of their decision-making episodes varied according to task-related and learner-related factors, and infer how the participants’ thinking might be linked to SLA processes. These analyses were intended as a preliminary step before designing more controlled research to test the potential causal relationship between composition writing and L2 learning. Swain and Lapkin’s (1995) partial replication of Cumming´s research, also focused on composition writing under think-aloud conditions, but with adolescent learners of French. They investigated (i) whether young learners engaged in noticing processes while composing, (ii) which actions they reported implementing to overcome the problems experienced, and (iii) whether or not they performed grammatical and syntactic analyses in order to solve their linguistic problems. These two pioneering investigations provided rich descriptions of noticing processes during text-generation behaviour, as well as empirical evidence of the proficiency- and task-dependent nature of such noticing activity. Swain and Lapkin (1995) found that noticing while writing led to modified output and speculated whether L2 learning was taking place as a result of certain actions (i.e. generating and assessing alternatives, and applying the resulting knowledge) that were observed as part of their participants’ problem-solving behaviour during the reprocessing of their written output. Cumming (1990) also drew several conclusions regarding the connection between composition writing and language development, of which the following are especially relevant for our present purposes. First, he suggested that the benefits of writing for learning could be related to gaining control of one’s own “processes of producing a second language” (p.€504) rather than to expanding interlanguage resources. Secondly, and very importantly, he stressed that these potential learning outcomes of writing were more likely to be associated with complex, meaning-making, problem-solving types of writing tasks that entail a real challenge for students at ideational and linguistic levels. Surprisingly, however, the study of the connection between individual, challenging composition writing and L2 development has not been a central concern in either L2 writing or SLA research. The abundant literature on L2 writing processes (see Leki, Cumming & Silva 2008, for a recent review, and Manchón 2009a, for sustained programmes of research on writing processes) has not explored the



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 183

connection between cognitive activity and L2 development (but see Manchón & Roca 2007). Similarly, rich empirical evidence has been accumulated on the way in which both the act of writing itself and the processing of feedback can lead to advancing language competencies, although, as noted in Chapter 4, most of this research has studied collaborative writing, which has seldom been composition writing. Therefore, it is theoretically and pedagogically relevant to investigate whether the individual engagement with complex writing tasks can lead to advancing language competencies, what factors may mediate such learning, and what learning outcomes may result. The ecological validity of this research focus would be particularly relevant in foreign language (FL) contexts given the presence and value of individual, complex, meaning-making composition writing tasks in the language and literacy learning experience of many FL learners, especially university FL students (see Chapter 7 by Byrnes this volume), as was the case in our research context.

The study Our larger study is also exploratory in nature: we intended to gather empirical data that could shed light on issues worth investigating in more controlled studies on the writing-to-learn dimension of L2 writing in contexts similar to the one we investigated, i.e. a setting in which learning-to-write and writing-to-learn concerns were present. Similar to Cumming’s and Swain and Lapkin’s studies, we also collected introspection data, although in contrast to their cross-sectional research, ours attempted to shed light on our participants’ perceptions of their development as L2 writers and learners. We hoped to expand upon previous studies on the LLP of writing in various ways. First, our analysis of individual, self-produced, composition writing was thought to expand the existing body of research on the language learning resulting from reprocessing other-produced language, such as the studies on dictogloss, text reconstruction tasks, or editing writing activities (see Chapter 4). Second, we planned to analyze our participants’ introspections about various aspects and dimensions of the language learning potential afforded by writing, hence adding to recent analyses of L2 writers’ own perspectives and beliefs about L2 writing (see F. Hyland’s [this volume], and Storch & Wigglesworth [2010] studies of feedback). Third, we also hoped to add to previous research with our exploration of the writing-to-learn actions implemented by learners. This was seen as a relevant research endeavour given that the Output Hypothesis (cf. Swain 1985, 1995) predicted that one of the functions of pushed output (such as challenging, composition writing tasks) is the noticing of gaps in one’s own linguistic resources. It was further

184 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

argued that such noticing would lead to actions to fill such gaps and/or to more focused attention to incoming input. As stated in Chapter 4, these predictions are still empirical questions. From a theoretical perspective, a number of assumptions led us to analyze our participants’ perceptions of the LLP of writing in conjunction with their beliefs about writing and their goals for writing and also in connection with the conditions in their learning context. Regarding beliefs and goals, we assumed that, as illustrated in Figure 1, the LLP of writing is closely linked to and dependent on the nature of the problem-solving behaviour learners engage in during the completion of their writing tasks (see arguments in Manchón & Roca de Larios 2007). It was also assumed that the depth of the writer’s problem-solving behaviour is ultimately dependent on his/her “mental model” of writing a term that refers to the set of mental representations, beliefs and conceptions that guide performance (Manchón 2009b). In the case of writing, these models may range along a continuum from more one-dimensional mental models (which involve simplistic assumptions about the nature and functions of writing) to more multi-dimensional ones (which would conceptualize writing as a complex task that requires attendance to various higher- and lower-level concerns). Accordingly, one’s own mental model of writing will guide the (more or less complex) goals pursued in the completion of writing tasks, the aspects of the task attended to, and hence the depth of one’s own problem-solving behavior while writing. As mentioned above, such depth of processing is thought to be critical regarding the language learning outcome that may potentially derive from the engagement with writing

The writer’s mental model of writing Goals for writing Aspects of the writing task attended to Depth of problem-solving behaviour Potential language learning

Figure 1.╇ The relationship between the writer’s mental model of writing, goals for writing and the language learning potential of L2 writing (based on Manchón 2008)



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 185

tasks. This view is, in effect, the problem-solving version of the noticing function of challenging output that was propounded in the original formulation of the Output Hypothesis. We also assumed that learning does not take place in a vacuum and that, accordingly, an inquiry into the learning potential of writing had to attempt to combine the personal and the social, represented in our research by the mediation of instruction. Accordingly, we also looked into the participants’ own perceptions of the influence of instructional forces in their conceptualizations of academic writing, the development of their goals for writing, and their decisions regarding their language learning actions via writing. These introspections were contrasted with our secondary data sources (see under Method below). Based on these assumptions, the analysis of our participants’ perceptions of the LLP of writing revolved around five inter-related questions: 1. Did the participants’ conceptualization of academic writing change after completing an EAP course? 2. Did the participants’ goals for academic writing change after completing an EAP course? 3. What were the students’ perceptions after having completed the EAP course of the language learning potential of writing in terms of learning processes and outcomes? 4. What actions did they report implementing in order to make the most of the language learning potential afforded by their L2 writing activity in the EAP course? 5. What individual and contextual factors did the participants report as having influenced their evolving conceptualization of academic writing, the dynamics of their goals for writing, and their own engagement in language learning actions via writing?

Method The research site Our study was conducted in an EAP writing course. The EAP course (“Lengua Inglesa IV” – English Language IV) was a nine-month, fourth-year compulsory module in a five-year degree in English Studies at the University of Murcia, Spain. According to the official curricular information as well as the teacher’s own account in her retrospective narrative (see data sources below), its main aim was to help students develop more advanced and integrated academic reading and

186 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

writing skills, although the module was also conceived as a language course in the participants’ degree programme. The pedagogical intervention was based on the students’ independent writing and the work done in class during contact hours (3€hours per week over a period of 30 weeks, from September to June). The course was built around three major tasks, undertaken in this order: (i) a personal statement to support a (fictitious) application to a postgraduate course in the UK or USA, (ii) a synthesis of a group of pre-assigned texts, mainly from newspapers, and (iii) a report of a survey designed and carried out by students themselves on a topic of interest to them (see Appendix 1 for some of the material the students were given for the second assignment). Each of the texts for the three course assignments was produced in three drafts with feedback between each one, provided by peers on content and organization (after the first draft) and by the teacher (after the second draft) mostly in the form of indirect written corrective feedback (CF) but with some direct feedback where considered necessary. In addition to the course assignments, over the course of the year students were also required to write 45 journals that included free expressions of whichever topics the student wanted to write about and, to a lesser extent, topics set by the teacher (dealing with reflections on the course, their learning, the textbook, teaching, classes, etc.). These journals were handed in weekly and then read and commented on by the native English teaching assistants, who commented at first on content alone and later, as the course developed, on both content and language matters, the latter frequently in the form of simple underlining or yellow highlighting of recurrent problems. The aim of these journals was to get students to communicate through writing and to help them develop fluency in writing so they did not form part of the assessment for the final grade. Assessment was based on coursework (a portfolio consisting of the assignments written during the year, which amounted to 70% of the final mark) and final examination (an argumentative text of about 500–600 words on a general academic topic, accounting for 30% of the final mark).

Participants The participants in the wider project were the student writers (N = 18) and the teacher in charge of the EAP course. The student writers (who participated on a voluntary basis) were in their early twenties. They possessed an advanced L2 proficiency level according to the Oxford Placement Test (Allen 1985). They had previously taken three compulsory annual courses in English language covering the four skills and grammar teaching, which were designed to take them from pre-intermediate to advanced proficiency level.



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 187

The lecturer in charge of the EAP course was a native speaker of English with ample experience (over 25 years) of EFL teaching at various educational levels and 5 years’ experience of teaching the EAP at the time of data collection. She also had experience lecturing on second language acquisition and second language teaching methodology, and more than ten years of continuous involvement in different L2 writing research projects. She was involved in the wider research project of which this study is part, although she only joined the research team for the study after the entire programme of research had been designed and all the data collected.

Data sources Data for the larger research project came from multiple sources collected with diverse methods. The primary data for the present study were participants’ responses during in-depth semi-structured interviews collected at two points in time, i.e. October (T1) and May/June (T2), and self-reflection journals (written at T2). For the larger project, we also collected other writing data from the participants (a standardised proficiency test and an argumentative writing task in their L1 and L2 written under time-constrained conditions at T1 and T2), official curricular documents, classroom observation data, and the information provided by the instructor in an in-depth interview and a written retrospective narrative in which she was asked to reflect on various dimensions of the planning and implementation of the EAP course. For triangulation purposes, these various data sources will be treated as secondary data in the present study when commenting on our primary data, especially in relation to research question 5. Our two primary data sources (in-depth interviews and reflective journals) were chosen because of their potential to tap into the participants’ introspections about the various dimensions and variables included in our research questions. These two instruments were piloted and, where needed, revised. The interview data were collected by means of a semi-structured interview protocol adapted from Cumming (2006). The protocol asked participants to describe and give examples, when appropriate, of their previous writing experience and instruction, their goals for writing, their writing strategies and their beliefs about themselves as writers and about academic writing, various aspects of their problem-solving behaviour while writing, their use of the feedback they received on their writing and, finally, several dimensions of the EAP course. The interview protocol at T2 was slightly modified in some areas in order to elicit data on the participants’ own perceptions of the dynamics of change our research questions focused on. The interviews, which ranged in duration from 40 minutes to one hour, were conducted

188 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

by the present authors with each individual student in Spanish, audiotaped and later transcribed in full. The six reflective journals constituted the second main data source for the present study. For triangulation purposes these asked the participants to reflect (at times being asked to write to prospective students. See Appendix 2) on their perceptions regarding (i) whether or not they had changed as writers over the course of the academic year, (ii) the language learning potential of writing and how to make the most of it, (iii) what academic writing involves and the way in which their views on this issue had changed over the course of the academic year, (iv) the development of their goals for writing, (v) the development of their writing strategies, and (vi) what a prospective student should expect of the EAP course. The prompts for these journals were developed by the present authors in collaboration with the teacher in charge of the EAP course.

Data analysis In preparation for the coding process, both the transcriptions of the interviews and the written reflective journals were segmented into thematic units, which were taken to be sets of “statements conveying one identifiable coherent idea” (Luk 2008:â•›628). Following conventions in the analysis of qualitative data (cf. Miles & Huberman 1994), we read through a sample (around 30%) of the interview data at T1 and T2 in order to become familiar with the transcripts. We then reviewed the transcripts several times looking for statements (i.e. thematic units) regarding the dimensions of writing included in our research questions. This iterative process was conceptually informed by our understanding of theories and research discussed in the Introduction section above. We did this for every participant by first comparing the transcripts of their interviews at T1 and T2 and then compiled an interview profile for each participant. This was followed by the necessary process of data reduction, which we did by looking for overarching themes across the various subject profiles.A similar approach was followed in the analysis of the reflective journals. We finally engaged in data triangulation (Erzberger & Kelle 2003). First, we compared and contrasted our participants’ perceptions across the six reflective journals. Second, this account was contrasted and completed with the data from the interviews. Third, the data from the journals and the interviews were triangulated with the information drawn from various analyses of our secondary data sources in this study (see previous section). The outcome of these analyses are interpreted in the sections that follow.



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 189

Results and discussion We shall now report and interpret the data guided by the first four research questions. These analyses will also account for the participants’ perceptions of the learner-internal and learner-external variables mediating their learning processes and outcomes (our final research question). It should also be noted that, unless otherwise stated, the descriptions presented below are the tendencies shared by at least half of the participants in the study.

Dynamics in the participants’ conceptualization of academic writing Our data point to changes in the participants’ conceptualizations of the nature and demands of writing, a change that the participants reported to apply to both writing products and processes, as illustrated in the following excerpt: (1) Now I look at the ideas, I look at cohesion, I look at coherence, I look at the “purpose”, I think of the person I am writing to. […] I have discovered that there is a process before, during, and after (S16, I-T2).

At a product level, there are multiple indications in the data that, as shown in (1), the students developed a more multi-dimensional mental model of writing with the result that at the end of the EAP course the participants conceptualized academic writing as encompassing different levels to be attended to (ideational, textual, and linguistic dimensions), as well as the audience of their texts, and the adherence to academic writing conventions. This represented a departure from their previous learning experience, in which their main concern had been accuracy. The students further reported that the teacher had encouraged them from the outset to address these various concerns, which the teacher herself confirmed in her retrospective narrative, where she stated: (2) I drew a diagram on the board and talked about ideational, textual and linguistic levels of writing. I said that perhaps in previous years of Lengua Inglesa [English Language] the emphasis had been more on the language level but that this year we would work on all three levels. I talked about different combinations: how a person might be good at getting ideas but poor at English expression, or great at English language but with no ideas, or great ideas but . All the extracts from the interviews are translations form Spanish. Notation used in the excerpts: Participants (identified by “S” and a number) and data sources, i.e. interviews (I-T1€= Interview at Time 1, or I-T2 = Interview at T2) or reflective journals (identified as J1 to J6, as detailed in Appendix 2).

190 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

not know how to organise them into a coherent text. So different combinations and different problems at different levels.

The students’ views could therefore be seen as mere reproduction of the teacher pedagogical discourse (“ventrilocution of teacher discourse” in Ortega’s [2008] words). However, our analysis of their argumentative essays written at T1 and T2 revealed that these differed significantly in several dimensions that, according to the qualitative data, the students had gradually added to the concerns while writing. For instance, the holistic assessment used in that analysis (based on HampLyons 1991. See Table 1) showed a statistically significant improvement in the participants’ ability to commuÂ�nicate through writing, to organize their ideas in writing, to present their arguments, and to write more appropriately. Accuracy, however, only approached significance (p = .056). As mentioned above, the changes in the participants’ conceptualization of academic writing also applied to the composing process: they reported having become aware that writing entailed problem-solving (regarding the three macroprocesses, i.e. planning, formulation and revision), that problem-solving activity was closely linked to continuous decision making (involving, among other things, sequencing the stages of problem-solving activity), and that writing entailed a high dose of rewriting, which had not been part of their previous language learning or literacy experience. Another important change at a process level was the students’ perception of the needed flexibility in their use of strategies in the sense of having to adapt their strategy deployment to the task at hand, as illustrated in (3): (3) The approach that I have adopted throughout the year as far as writing strategies are concerned has always depended on the sort of texts that I have been asked to produce. Even though I used to deal with every single essay being exactly the same, I have realised that this procedure is definitely wrong. For instance, in order to carry out a successful extended essay, you cannot follow the same guidelines that you might utilise when writing an argumentative text (S08, J5). Table 1.╇ Holistic analysis of the essays written at T1 and T2 Time 1 Communicative Organization Argumentation Accuracy Appropriacy Holistic rating

Time 2

x

SD

x

SD

â•⁄ 5.66 â•⁄ 5.38 â•⁄ 5.50 â•⁄ 5.83 â•⁄ 6.11 28.5

1.02 1.24 0.78 0.70 0.67 3.73

â•⁄ 7.16 â•⁄ 7.05 â•⁄ 7.00 â•⁄ 6.50 â•⁄ 7.11 34.8

1.24 1.34 1.28 1.20 0.96 4.9

Wilcoxon

Sig

–2.899 –3.04 –3.347 –1.913 –3.166 –3.484

.004 .002 .001 .056 .002 .000



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 191

Based on the various data sources, we interpret the reported changes in the participants’ task conceptualization at a product and process level as the outcome of the combined effect of the instruction received (which included explicit instruction on academic writing), and their extensive and varied writing practice. This interaction between learner factors and instructional factors offers further empirical support to the findings obtained by Wolfersberger (2007) in what is perhaps the most comprehensive study on task conceptualization to date. Based on the assumption that the completion of academic writing tasks entails “an understanding of what skills, products, and processes the task requires and make a plan of action that will lead to a written product that appropriately fulfils the writing task” (Wolfersberger 2007:â•›73), the author analyzed the factors influencing L2 writers’ representation of the assignment task throughout the process of writing (in his case, 3 drafts over 21 weeks). He found that the dynamics of his participants’ task representation varied in a number of parameters and, importantly for us, that these changes were motivated by a combination of writer-internal factors (ability factors as well as what he called “process factors”) and learner-external factors (represented by the teacher and “other people” mediation). Our findings also support recent claims on the need to open the task-based language learning and teaching research agenda to the investigation of the “insider dimension of tasks” (Manchón 2009c), which would include issues of task conceptualization, task complexity, and task difficulty. Thus, Robinson (2007) has noted the mediating role that learner factors may play regarding both task implementation and potential learning outcomes, and he also stressed that “these individual difference-task dimension interactions are in great need of further theoretical motivation and subsequent study for their effects in language production and language learning during task-based instruction” (Robinson 2007:â•›210). Along the same lines, in her study of learner’s perceptions of task difficulty, Tavakoli (2009:â•›2) argued for the relevance of research on learner’s own perceptions because “such an insider perspective will broaden the current understandings of TD [task difficulty] and will assist language educators in designing and employing more effective language teaching materials.” Our suggestion would be that these issues are worth investigating also with respect to writing (since in task-based research speaking is explicitly or implicitly treated as the default form of language learning) and not only for pedagogical purposes related to task design and task sequencing concerns (which is the angle most commonly adopted in task-based research and pedagogical discourse), but also for theoretical and pedagogical reasons related to the language learning potential that tasks – in our case, writing tasks – can afford.

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Dynamics of the participants’ goals for academic writing As anticipated, the dynamics of change observed in the students’ conceptualization of academic writing matched their reported changes regarding their goals for learning and writing, understood as “explicit statements of desire or need in relation to the learning of L2 composition or related abilities” (Zhou, Busch, Gentil, Eouanzoui & Cumming 2006). Following this operational definition, the interviews and reflective journal data showed that the participants’ goals appeared to have changed with respect to the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of their writing. For learning-to-write concerns, the development towards a more multidimensional mental model of writing mentioned above brought with it a gradual expansion of the range of goals the participants reported pursuing in their writing and, accordingly, from being solely concerned with accuracy, as suggested above, they had gradually attempted to write longer, more ideationally and linguistically complex, more coherent and cohesive texts, in which they reported paying attention to the structuring of ideas and to text-type conventions. According to the participants’ own introspections, these changes were also partially prompted by the metacognitive knowledge about academic writing they had acquired in the EAP course (see Manchón 2009b for further elaboration of this issue), the feedback they received on their writing, and the extensive and demanding writing practice they engaged in. Interestingly, the combination of these various factors was perceived as having contributed to increasing their confidence in their own ability to express themselves in writing, which, in turn, encouraged them to attempt to write more complex, and longer texts, with more complex ideas and, very importantly, more complex language, especially regarding syntactic complexity and lexical variety and complexity, as illustrated in (4): (4) I am aiming to put into practice the knowledge and techniques we are learning [in order] to write texts more complex in ideas, structures and language that can help me in my professional and academic life (SO2, J4).

These data both confirm and add to the findings reported in the most relevant study published to date on EFL writers’ goals (Sasaki 2009). Sasaki, in a 3.5 year long longitudinal study with Japanese university EFL writers who had either gone abroad for different periods of time or remained at home, found that learning how to write through explicit writing classes and having to write a lot and often were crucial factors in the development of their L2 writing ability, this being especially the case for the study abroad learners. Moreover, in the case of some study-abroad students, another important factor was their drive to produce rhetorically refined texts suited to the demands of L2-related imagined communities. Sasaki’s results



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 193

corroborate these findings since our participants also noted the importance of metacognitive knowledge, their opportunities for extensive writing practice and their efforts to approximate native-like standards. It is important to note, however, that, in contrast to Sasaki’s research, these outcomes took place in an “at-home” setting, which might be the result of our participants experiencing in their home learning context all the conditions that Sasaki reported as being part of her participants’ study-abroad experiences. In the case of Sasaki’s studies, the factors that were present in the study-abroad experience (and not in the home context) were (a) the demand to write extensively; (b) the existence of an authentic audience and immediate need to write; and (c) explicit instruction about L2 writing. These various factors were undoubtedly present in the context we investigated. However, our data also revealed an important goal that went unreported by Sasaki, namely, the use of L2 writing as an appropriate scenario for the development of language capacities, i.e. goals related to the writing-to-learn dimension of L2 writing. Although the general feeling among our participants was that the EAP course was a learning-to-write module, they all perceived the writing-to-learn effects that could have been an off-shoot of the attempt to stretch one’s interlanguage resources while composing, as neatly expressed in (5): (5) I feel like writing more complex and important papers because writing is a good way of practising and improving my English as well as being more fluent and accurate (S01, J4).

Students’ introspections about the language learning potential  of writing regarding learning outcomes The participants overwhelmingly asserted they had improved their language competencies throughout the academic year, which was confirmed by the statistically significant improvement observed in the proficiency test scores at T1 and T2 (p€=€.004), as well as in various dimensions of their texts written at T1 and T2 as measured holistically (p = .000) and by a set of analytic measures. The Wilcoxon non-parametric test revealed statistically significant differences between the beginning (T1) and the end (T2) of the academic year as regards the domains of accuracy (as measured by error-free clauses, p = .01), fluency (as measured by essay length, total number of clauses and of sentences, p = .012), and lexical variety (as measured by Giraud’s index, p = .012). These findings partly corresponded to the participants’ own perceptions of improvement: they reported having developed their interlanguage mainly in terms of grammar and, especially, vocabulary. Interestingly, the analysis of the

194 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

classroom data showed that vocabulary concerns were dominant in the lessons that we observed. Our participants’ introspections regarding their vocabulary learning can be interpreted as suggesting that the changes affected the depth and breath of their vocabulary resources, and their speed of lexical retrieval. What is more, as we learn in (6), the students’ own agency was crucial in bringing about vocabulary learning through writing, (6) I have acquired some new vocabulary. Before I was just interested in learning new vocabulary orally for which interacting with English people was an indispensable condition. Now I can learn vocabulary on my own through writing. I frequently use a semantic dictionary and I try to learn a lot of synonyms or words that belong to the same field (S17, J1).

Students’ perceptions of the language learning potential of writing: Mediating factors, learning processes and learning actions As graphically represented in Figure 2, the participants perceived that the potential learning outcomes of their writing resulted from a combination of their sustained and challenging writing activity, and the instruction received in the EAP course. In both cases, certain learning processes were promoted: noticing (both while writing and while processing the feedback) and practice processes in the case of writing, and tailor-made form-focused instruction, in the case of the pedagogical intervention provided in the EAP course.

Writing

– Noticing – Practice

Instruction

Language learning potential of L2 writing

–Tailor-made formfocused instruction

Figure 2.╇ Mediating factors and learning processes related to the writing-to-learn  dimension of L2 writing



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 195

Noticing processes and associated learning actions The participants’ introspections in the reflective journals and their answers and comments in the interviews pointed to the learning value they assigned to the noticing processes they engaged in both while writing and while processing the feedback. The participants reported engaging in deep processing of feedback for learning-to-write and writing-to-learn purposes, the latter referring in their view to the expansion of their linguistic resources and to hypothesis-testing processes. One of contributing factors to the participants’s active involvement with the feedback received appeared to be what Lee and Scallet (2008) termed the “trusting relationship” with the instructor. In their study this explained their students’ revision behaviour. In ours, it could account for both the crucial role that the participants assigned to their teacher’s feedback in the revision of their texts, and their active engagement with their teachers’ feedback for writing-to-learn purposes, an issue worth exploring further in future studies. Our data is especially rich regarding the participants’ noticing activity while writing. Their views echoed one of the main tenets of the Output Hypothesis, according to which the production of challenging output may serve a noticing function because L2 users may become aware of the gap between what they know and can do, and what they need to know in order to convey their intended messages successfully. This phenomenon has later been referred to as “noticing the hole”, and it is neatly illustrated in (7) and (8): (7) … when you are going to express your ideas, you see that the grammar you´ve had up to now is sort of not enough, and then you start working on your ideas so that you find a way of expressing them better, and then you start seeing your problems with grammar, and you try to improve, to solve the problems (S09, I-T2). (8) Writing every week helps you see the gaps of your learning process. It makes you want to know more about the language you are learning and search new expressions in order not to be repetitive in all your texts (S06, I-T2).

The struggle with language mentioned in these excerpts led the participants to experience the metalinguistic function of pushed output also propounded in the Output Hypothesis, as expressed in (9): (9) By writing you see the limitations with the language used. Very often I have doubts about the way I have to say things and that makes me think more deeply about the language (S12, J4).

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The deep reflection on language mentioned in (9) may be thought of as having the potential to help L2 writers to develop their L2 knowledge because, as noted by Izumi (2003), reflection on language “may deepen the learner’s awareness of forms, rules, and form-function relationship if the context of production is communicative in nature” (Izumi 2003:â•›170). In fact, in his studies comparing the outcomes of input and output learning conditions (see review in Chapter 4), Izumi argued that the greater learning gains observed in the output subjects was due to the deeper and more elaborate processing of language they engaged in as compared to their input counterparts. What our data show is that these learning outcomes were closely associated with the linguistic processing required to successfully perform the complex and demanding writing tasks that constituted the EAP course assignments. Very importantly, the participants’s views in this respect can be linked to Cumming’s observations mentioned in the opening section regarding the close connection between the potential learning outcomes of writing and the L2 writers’ own perceptions of the complexity involved in writing. He talked about the potential for language learning of tasks about which learners “believe that the substance of their writing merits careful thought, that the purpose of their writing is to convey information to others, and that the texts they produce can be improved through rethinking and revision” (p. 504), which is, we would argue, how our participants viewed their course assignments. There is one further piece of the puzzle worth mentioning, and this relates to the students’ agency in bringing about learning through writing, as advanced in an earlier section. They clearly perceived that the learning potential of their noticing activity while writing and while processing feedback was crucially dependent on their own follow-up learning actions. In other words, noticing, and engaging in deep problem-solving while writing and processing feedback for revision purposes was not enough to bring about language learning via writing. Accordingly, both in the interview at T2 and also in Journal 2 (in which they had to advise prospective students how to make the most of their writing activity in terms of language learning), our student writers talked at length about both what they had done, what they had not done, but should have done, and what they advised others to do, for writing-to-learn purposes. First, as we learn in (10), all the participants without exception reported copying into their “notebooks” the new language noticed, an action that, once again, had been encouraged by the teacher, although the students were free to organize their notebooks as they saw fit: (10) As far as structures, vocabulary and grammar are concerned, it is important to have a notebook where you jot down all the new things that you learn in and outside the class and that you reread it frequently (S18, J2).



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 197

As explicitly stated in (10), these notebooks constituted both a record of their learning and also a resource tool they used when writing. The notebooks recorded what the students noticed themselves or what was pointed out in the different classes, whether during their reading for the various modules in their degree studies, when receiving feedback on their writing, or while solving problems during their text-generation activity. However, it was up to the each student to decide what made its way into his/her notebook and how. Second, in addition to the notebooks, the students also reported their perception of the potential learning benefits of exercising their own agency in engaging in further processing and analysis of the language noticed while writing and while processing feedback, even if this required time they did not always have. These perceptions can be interpreted as a perceived need to move from pure “noticing” to “understanding” (Schmidt 1995, 2001), the latter being a deeper form of awareness supposed to result in a greater and more long-lasting memory trace, a prediction that, for writing, would need to be put to empirical test in future research (but see Sheen’s 2010 discussion of the effects of oral and written corrective feedback in terms of the noticing and understanding processes that each type of feedback fosters).

The role of practice in bringing about learning through writing As shown in Figure 2, in addition to the learning value assigned to noticing processes and associated learning actions, the participants also reported experiencing the language learning value of “practice” in two different ways: practice understood as making use of the language learned, as in (11): (11) Although it is not an easy task, it [writing] really helps you to learn, in this case, English, because you put into practice all you know (S09, J2)

and practice in terms of the constant challenging writing activity demanded of them. Their observations once again echoed some tenets in cognitive accounts of SLA, in this case Skill Learning Theory, according to which “a large amount of practice is needed to decrease the time required to execute the task (reaction time), the percentage of errors (error rate), and the amount of attention required (and hence interference with/from other tasks). This practice leads to gradual automatization of knowledge” (DeKeyser 2007:â•›88–89). Our data show that the students perceived the benefits of practice in terms of fluency, automatization of linguistic resources and, hence, faster retrieval, as noted in the following extracts:

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(12) I see myself more fluent and self-confident with what I write. In fact, structures now come automatically to my mind and I am able to write more in less time (S18, J1). (13) For me writing is practice. And I gradually take less time (S07, I-T2).

These perceptions were supported by the statistically significant differences (Figure 3) as far as fluency between essays written at T1 and T2 (measured as total number of words) was concerned. Fluency measures 450,00

385,11

400,00 350,00 300,00

312,50

250,00

T1 T2

200,00 150,00 100,00 50,00 0,00

Essay length

37,56 47,50

15,11 20,33

Total number of clauses

Total number of sentences

Figure 3.╇ Fluency measures (T1 and T2)

The role of instruction in bringing about learning through writing The participants pointed to the mediation of instruction as another factor contributing to learning through writing, especially regarding the tailor-made formfocused instruction they received (see Figure 2). Almost without exception, they reported benefiting greatly from the work done in class concerning errors. Our analysis of the classroom observation data and the teacher’s responses in an indepth interview showed that these activities were related to the teacher’s systematic collection of errors from the specific assignments that the students were required to complete in the hope that this classroom activity would help them to concentrate on certain grammatical structures and lexis. As the teacher asserted in the interview: (14) In the past I used to mix all types of errors calling them language errors in general but now I try and collect them in connection with the assignment in hand.



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 199

In addition, the students valued the tailor-made linguistic explanations provided by the teacher in class, which we have called “analytical episodes” in our analysis of the classroom data (see Roca de Larios et al. forthcoming). They included various types among which two, “interpretative episodes” and “collective reformulation episodes, were the ones that corresponded to those that the students mentioned in the journals and in the interview. Interpretive episodes mainly consisted of analyses and judgments by students as to the grammaticality, rhetorical appropriateness, etc. of sentences or texts taken from the textbook or written by the students themselves. Collective reformulation episodes refer to instances whereby the teacher and the students analyze, evaluate, and reformulate sentences taken from assignments previously written by the students, and selected by the teacher on account of their language learning potential, an outcome (language learning) that the students perceived themselves, as illustrated in (15): (15) […] many students think that for the first time in their degree, the most common problems that we have always had in English are explained in such a way that you actually understand why you make those mistakes, and therefore, you are able to correct them (S01, J6).

In addition to the classroom observation data, the teacher’s data also supported the tailor-made form-focused instruction the students mentioned, as explicitly stated in (16): (16) I always ask them to try out new language try out things […] when they think of sentences of their own is when we get to the interesting points because they can come up with possibilities that I hadn’t foreseen at all… […] they can come up with structural sentences that are problematic for them […] things that are on the edge of their competence […] I want them to come up with problems so that we can explore them.

Implications and suggestions for further research Figure 4 is a graphic representation and interpretation of the main insights obtained from our analysis of the participants’ introspections in the in-depth interviews and self-reflection journals. As reported above, we observed that the extensive writing activity our participants engaged in, coupled with the meta-linguistic knowledge about academic writing acquired in the EAP course, resulted in their reported gradual development towards a more multidimensional mental model of writing. We considered that these changes in task conceptualization were considered to have contributed to expanding the range of goals they pursued in their writing,

200 Rosa M. Manchón and Julio Roca de Larios

The writer’s mental model of writing Goals for writing

Aspects of the task attended to Depth of problemsolving behaviour Potential language learning

Multidimensional model of writing – Writing goals – Language learning goals – Range of concerns: ideational, textual & linguistic – Language complexity goals – Noticing and practice processes – Form-focused instruction – Student’s agency

Figure 4.╇ Summary of main findings regarding the language learning potential  of writing

not only writing goals, but also language learning goals. Accordingly, the students reported adding not only ideational and textual concerns to their goals for writing, but also new linguistic ones that entailed going beyond accuracy in their attempt to stretch their interlanguage resources in search of the complex language needed to express the more complex ideas they now wanted to convey in their writing. Addressing these various concerns entailed their engagement in more challenging problem-solving behaviour while completing their assigned writing tasks. In turn, this shift appeared to be instrumental in bringing about language learning through the engagement in practice and noticing processes (while writing and while processing feedback) and associated language learning actions, the latter being crucially dependent on the students’ own agency and the tailor-made form-focused instruction the students had access to. Accordingly, our data can be interpreted as suggesting that a combination of individual and social (instructional) factors contributed to our participants becoming more adept at expressing themselves in writing and at bringing about learning through writing. Once again, we should emphasise the crucial role played by the students’ own agency in making the most of these learning opportunities together with the mediation through instruction. This is an area where individual differences can be expected, which makes the analysis of individual differences



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 201

an item worth including in future research agendas. Finally, the students’ perceptions of the learning opportunities afforded by their writing appeared to be closely linked to the perceived challenging and demanding nature of the writing tasks they were asked to perform, a finding that points to two additional avenues for future research. One is the need to devote effort to the operationalization of “task complexity” and “challenging output” in research on writing, which may entail departing from previous tenets in research on speaking. The other is the need to account for affective factors (such as students’ beliefs, attitudes, and goals) when exploring and explaining the language learning dimension of L2 writing, thus following Storch and Wigglesworth’ (2010) recent initiative to account for both linguistic and affective factors when explaining the effectiveness of feedback. Regarding the general theme of this book, our data also point to the intricate patterns of interaction that appear to take place when learning-to-write and writing-to-learn purposes are present in a given learning context. Our contention would be that the influence of “L2 writing” and “L2 learning” in the context we investigated was bidirectional in the sense that writing was perceived by our participants as promoting language learning, and this learning, in turn, was viewed as helping to increasing their motivation to engage in deeper problem solving as well as further and more challenging writing. Therefore, the language learning associated with writing was for our participants both a motivating factor and one of the goals they pursued in their writing. Given the exploratory nature of our research, caution is necessary regarding possible implications of our findings for research and pedagogy. At the level of research, the richness of our data would justify the suggestion to make the study of writing more central in SLA research and the study of the writing-to learn dimension of writing more central in L2 writing research (see Chapter 1). The research agendas in both fields would have to address many open questions regarding the learning processes that may mediate the development of language abilities through writing. Future research agendas will also have to include the exploration of the very nature of the short-term and long-term learning outcomes that may stem from writing, especially regarding whether writing leads to the expansion and/or consolidation of L2 knowledge, and if so, when, how, and why. Based on our own findings, crucial items in this research agenda would be the analysis of student agency, individual differences and affective factors in making the most of learning opportunities afforded by their sustained engagement with challenging composition writing. Also, given our findings on the crucial role that the instructional intervention played in promoting language development in the context we studied, further research will have to ascertain which kinds of instructional interventions are more likely to foster L2 learning via writing in diverse writing-to-learn instructional settings and with different populations of

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L2 writers. The implications for theory and pedagogy have been neatly expressed by Ortega (2009:â•›245): Thus, on the one hand, we need to know how we can foster writing tasks that engage and motivate EFL students and make them want to pose themselves sophisticated problems as writers, as well as to persist and spend as much time as needed in writing. On the other hand, we will also need to understand better how such increased investment in writing may affect linguistic development, and whether and how in such cases accuracy goals may need to be balanced in special ways.

The present study was exploratory in nature and limited in terms of data sources (data collection at only 2 points in time), population (just one group of advanced, highly motivated, university students) and context studied (one in which the dimensions of learning-to-write and writing-to-learn were part of the learning-teaching context, this being a configuration that cannot be extrapolated to many non-university FL learning contexts). Despite these drawbacks, it is hoped that the findings of this study can be useful in indicating areas of research in need of further study, and contribute to a fuller understanding of the crucial language learning function that L2 writing can play in many instructional SLA contexts.

Acknowledgements The study reported here is part of a programme of research financed the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology (Research Grant FFI2009-14155). We are grateful to Liz Murphy, Lourdes Ortega, and Neomi Storch for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this chapter.

References Allen, D. 1985. Oxford Placement Test. Oxford: OUP. Cumming, A. 1990. Metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. Written Communication 7(4): 482–511. Cumming, A. (ed.). 2006. Goals for Academic Writing: ESL Students and their Instructors [Language Learning & Language Teaching 15]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DeKeyser, R. 2007. Skill acquisition theory. In Theories in Second Language Acquisition, B. VanPatten & J. Williams (eds), 97–113. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Erzberger, C. & Kelle, U. 2003. Making inferences in mixed methods: The rules of integration. In Handbook of Mixed Methods in Social and Behavioural Research, A. Tashakkori & C.€Teddue (eds), 457–488. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage.



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Izumi, S. 2003. Comprehension and production processes in second language learning: In search of the psycholinguistic rationale of the Output Hypothesis. Applied Linguistics 24(2): 168–196. Lee, G. & Scallet, D. L. 2008. Meeting in the margins: Effects of teacher-student relationship on revision processes of EFL college students taking a composition course. Journal of Second Language Writing 17: 165–182. Leki, I., Cumming, A. & Silva, T. 2008. A Synthesis if Research on Second Language Writing in English. New York NY: Routledge. Luk, J. 2008. Assessing teaching practicum reflections: Distinguishing discourse features of the ‘high’ and ‘low’ grade reports. System 36: 624–641. Manchón, R. M. 2009a. Foreign Language Writing. Learning, Teaching, and Research. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Manchón, R. M. 2009b. Individual differences in foreign language writing: The dynamics of beliefs about L2 writing. RESLA 22: 245–268. Manchón, R. M. 2009c. Task conceptualization and writing development in EAP: Dynamics of change in a task-based EAP course. Paper presented at the TBLT 2009 Conference, Lancaster, UK. Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language contexts. In The Intercultural Speaker. Using and Acquiring English in Instructed Language Contexts, E.€Alcón & P. Safont (eds), 101–121. Dordrecht: Springer. Miles, M. B. & Huberman, A. M. 1994. Qualitative Data Analysis. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Ortega, L. 2008. Discussant in colloquium ‘L2 writing in transnational perspective: Learningto-write and writing-to-learn dimensions’, 2008 AILA Conference, Essen, Germany. Ortega, L. 2009. Studying writing across EFL contexts: Looking back and moving forward. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching, and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 232–255. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Robinson, P. 2007. Task complexity, theory of mind, and intentional reasoning: Effects on L2 speech production, interaction, uptake and perceptions of task difficulty. International Review of Applied Linguistics 45(3): 193–213. Roca de Larios, J., Murphy, L., Nicolás-Conesa, F. & Naves, T. Forthcoming. Teacher cognition, classroom practice and learning outcomes in a universisty EFL writing course. Sasaki, M. 2009. Changes in EFL students’ writing over 3.5 years: A socio-cognitive account. In Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching and Research, R. M. Manchón (ed.), 49–76. Bristol: Multilingual Matters. Schmidt, R. W. (1995). Consciousness and foreign language learning: A tutorial on the role of attention and awareness in learning. In Attention and Awareness in Foreign Language Learning, R. W. Schmidt (ed.), 1–63. Honolulu HI: University of Hawaii Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Schmidt, R. 2001. Attention. In Cognition and Second Language Instruction, P. Robinson (ed.), 3–32. Cambridge: CUP. Storch, N. & Wigglesworth, G. 2010. Learners’ processing, uptake, and retention of corrective feedback on writing. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 303–334. Sheen, Y. 2010. Differential effects of oral and written feedback in the ESL classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 203–234. Swain, M. 1985. Communicative competence: Some roles of comprehensible input and comprehensible output in its development. In Input in Second Language Acquisition, S. Gass & C. Madden (eds), 235–153. Rowley MA: Newbury House.

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Swain, M. 1995. Three functions of output in second language learning. In Applied Linguistics. Studies in Honour of H. G. Widdowson, G. Cook & B. Seidlhofer (eds), 125–144. Oxford: OUP. Swain, M. & Lapkin, S. 1995. Problems in output and the cognitive processes they generate: A step toward second language learning. Applied Linguistics 16: 371–391. Tavakoli, P. 2009. Investigating task difficulty: Learners’ and teachers’ perceptions. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 19(1): 1–25. Wolfersberger, M. A. 2007. Second Language Writing from Sources: An Ethnographic Study of an Argument Essay Task. PhD dissertation, University of Auckland. Zhou, A., Bush, M., Gentil, G., Eouanzoui, K. & Cumming, A. 2006. Students’ goals for ESL and university courses. In Goals for Academic Writing: ESL Students and Their Instructors [Language Learning & Language Teaching 15], A. Cumming (ed.), 29–49. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.



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Appendix 1. Assignment 2 Assignment 2: Avoiding plagiarism Your purpose in this assignment is to examine a controversial issue objectively, looking at various viewpoints and using various sources, and finally coming to a conclusion about your own position. You should show that you are capable of reading and synthesising several sources using quotations, paraphrasing and summaries of the ideas in the source texts as well as correct citations and a bibliography. You should follow APA style. You can find information about APA style on the OWL online writing centre at Purdue university. http://www.owl.english.purdue.edu/ I shall leave in the photocopier 4 or 5 sets of texts on the different topics you may choose. You need to photocopy the set on the topic of your choice. You should read all the source texts in the set and then use them to write a critical synthesis. In order to do this you will need to understand the different persons/groups/positions involved and to summarise the main ideas of each. You should then write a text presenting an overview as well as your own position on the issue. In this assignment you need to show me that you can: • understand the main ideas in the texts you use and can summarise them. • quote, paraphrase and create an organised bibliography, but above all, show that you know when to use quotations and paraphrases appropriately. • construct an introduction where you make the background, your position, and the sources you are going to use clear to the reader. • build up a logical and reasonable argument with the necessary support to justify the claims you make. • write a rounded conclusion that summarises and looks forward in some way. .. as well as showing me that you have a good enough level of English expression to be able to pass 4th year. You should NOT just summarise each text one by one but should fuse them into an original text of your own making.

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Assignment 2: Avoiding plagiarism Student’s name ……………………………………………………….. REQUISITES: 1st draft ……… 2nd draft ……… 3rd draft ……… Double spacing ……… Times New Roman 12pt ……… Peer response ……… Sample Questions ……… Data summary ……… RHETORICAL AND DISCOURSE CONCERNS YES Topic covered in depth Evidence of original thought or personal reflection Introduction to topic with aims clearly presented Introduction to survey with method clearly presented Logically developed argument Good control of paragraphs (no sub-paragraphs) Clear conclusions leading back to introduction/aims Balance between general statements and specific data from survey Successful transitions between sections LANGUAGE CONCERNS Clear expression of meaning Flow of natural-sounding language Range of appropriate vocabulary Grammatical sentences Appropriate use of discourse connectors Succinctness (as opposed to repetitiveness, wordiness)

SPECIFIC PROBLEMS Paragraph structure

Verb forms

Fragments (incomplete sentences)

Spelling

Run-on sentences (no full stop)

Punctuation

Referents Verb tenses

What I liked most about this essay: What I liked least about this essay:

Other …………… ……………

NO



Chapter 9.╇ Writing-to-learn in FL contexts 207

Appendix 2. Reflective journals J1. Have you changed during the year in any way as far as writing is concerned? Do you see yourself any differently as a writer now and at the beginning of the year? If so, where does the difference lie? What were you like before? What are you like now? E.g. Do you feel more self-confident about your writing? Or less self-confident? Do you feel you have developed a personal voice in your writing? Try to talk about these matters and to tell us how you see yourself as a writer. J2. Write to prospective students (i) telling them in what ways writing has helped you to learn English language this year (if you think it has) and (ii) advising them about what they should do and what they should not do in order to make the most of the opportunities that writing practice gives them for learning (vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, etc). (iii) Do you feel that you have done this yourself, i.e made the most of your opportunities for learning more language this year? If not, why not? J3. In the light of what you now know, please write a journal entry trying to explain to a 3rd year student in our department what good academic writing is and what it involves. Try to focus on anything that you have discovered during this year that you did not know before. J4. Can you tell us if your goals for academic writing (both in Lengua Inglesa IV and in all your other courses) have changed since you’ve been doing this course? If you think they have changed, can you tell us how? (e.g. Are you more/less ambitious now than before? Are you aiming to do something more simple/more complex/longer/shorter or whatever?) J5. Think of the different assignments and extended essays you’ve completed this year. Think also of the way in which you’ve approached the planning and writing of these texts. Do you think that either the means or strategies you’ve used in your writing, or the way in which you use or have used these strategies, have in any way changed throughout this academic year? J6. Explain to a third year student what they should expect next year in Lengua Inglesa IV lessons. Try to give them a flavour of what the classes are like. Here we are not referring to what you have done at home outside the classroom but to the actual work in class.

chapter 10

Exploring the learning potential of writing development in heritage language education John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

Monterey Institute of International Studies, US /  Central Washington University, US

This chapter examines writing-to-learn practices in a U.S. university foreign language (FL) setting that serves both Anglophone learners of Spanish as a FL and heritage language (HL) students. The HL participants in this study, adults with biliterate knowledge in Spanish and English, exhibit skills, needs, and expectations that diverge considerably from those of their (monolingual) FL counterparts. Evidence gathered from interviews with instructors, student surveys, and instructional materials points toward an approach in which writing serves merely as a means of enhancing language proficiency (a writing-to-learn approach). Findings suggest that traditional writing-to-learn practices are  ill-suited to addressing HL students’ literacy needs, which include developing rhetorical skills and genre knowledge that have currency beyond the FL classroom. Accordingly, the chapter adds to the theme explored in the book with its analysis of the potential misalignments between the learning-to-write and  writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing that may exist in a given instructional€setting.

L2 writers represent widely heterogeneous learner populations, each facing unique challenges in terms of language socialization and literacy development processes. One such L2 writer population, until recently somewhat overlooked in the U.S. setting, consists of heritage language (HL) students enrolled in K-12 and post-secondary institutions (Pew Hispanic Center 2006; Peyton 2008; Roca & Colombi 2003). Valdés (2000:â•›1) defined an HL student as one who is “raised in a home where a non-English language is spoken, who speaks or merely understands the heritage language, and who is to some degree bilingual in English and the heritage language.” Kelleher (2008:â•›5) more broadly characterized an HL student as “a person studying a language who has proficiency in or a cultural connection to that language.”

210 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

This description characterizes the student writers featured in this chapter, though we focus chiefly on the academic literacy development of HL students in the university setting, where HL instruction tends to position writing as a means to an end, rather than as a complex academic skill requiring sustained cultivation beyond language courses. We explore the emergence of students’ bilingual communicative competence, as well as their biliterate development and identity construction processes, as they unfold in university language courses. We hope to approach the writing-to-learn/learning-to-write contrasts explored in this book from a novel angle by examining an educational setting where both dimensions inform instruction, sometimes coming into conflict. We likewise hope to illuminate the unique characteristics and needs of HL students, as well as the relevance of their writing development to mainstream writing research. As Valdés (2001:â•›38) observed, the HL student is “different in important ways from the traditional [FL] student. This difference … has to do with developed functional proficiencies in the heritage languages.” Recent research has distinguished between HL and FL students’ linguistic and academic literacy development, particularly in institutions that serve both FL and HL students with little or no differentiation (Campbell & Rosenthal 2005; Lynch 2003a, 2003b; Peyton 2008). This chapter examines writing instruction practices in a U.S. university setting where Anglophone learners of Spanish as a FL (traditional FL learners) study alongside HL students. The HL participants in this study, adults with varying levels of biliterate knowledge in Spanish and English, exhibit skills, needs, beliefs, and expectations that diverge considerably from those of their monolingual FL counterparts. For FL students, attaining communicative proficiency and literacy skills in Spanish represents a goal that is distinct from that of HL students undergoing formal instruction in a language that they speak and comprehend proficiently. HL students nonetheless encounter significant challenges when faced with reading and writing for academic purposes, skills that Spanishlanguage educators reportedly deem to be insufficient (Hidalgo 1993; Lefkowitz in press; Valdés, Fishman, Chávez & Pérez 2006; Valdés 1991; Valdés, Haro & Echevarriarza 1992). The student and instructor attitudes, beliefs, and practices examined in this study point systematically toward misaligned – and, at times, incompatible€– goals and processes. Historically, Spanish-language courses serving dual populations have tended to provide writing instruction geared narrowly toward FL learners. FL writing instruction often reflects a writing-to-learn view of language and literacy development. In a writing-to-learn approach, writing serves chiefly as a vehicle for language practice, which is thought to promote overall communicative language proficiency (Omaggio Hadley 2001; Savignon 1997; Shrum & Glisan 2010). In some proficiency-oriented FL instruction, writing tasks induce learners to



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 211

produce novel grammatical structures and vocabulary items – activities intended to generate pushed output (Edwards & Willis 2005; Ellis 2003, 2005; Leaver & Willis 2004). Thus, writing is “used as a production mode for learning, reinforcing, or testing grammatical concepts” (Brown 2007:â•›400). Writing tasks are therefore subordinate to the global aim of developing communicative language proficiency. In contrast to writing-to-learn models, learning-to-write approaches more substantively endeavor to cultivate students who become skilled writers in their target language, a goal parallel to that of mainstream (L1), ESL, and EAP composition courses (Ferris & Hedgcock 2005; F. Hyland this volume; K. Hyland 2003; J. Williams 2005; J. D. Williams 2003). HL students’ needs include not only improving the fluency and grammatical accuracy of their written products, but also developing rhetorical skills, discourse knowledge, and genre awareness that has currency beyond the FL classroom. That is, HL students exhibit learning-to-write needs. We recognize that selected institutions embrace socioliterate approaches to FL reading and writing instruction, as in the case of the genre-oriented curricular model described by Byrnes (Chapter 7 this volume). In our research context, however, FL writing instruction is geared toward enhancing learners’ skills as general users of Spanish. This writing-to-learn orientation might not optimally serve HL students, who often exhibit an urgent need to become skillful – if not facile – readers and writers of both Spanish and English in order to achieve personal, educational, and professional goals (Cohen & Gómez 2008; Parodi 2008; Schwartz 2003; Valdés et al. 2006; Valdés, González, García & Márquez 2008). Our classroom research has explored the language socialization and literacy development patterns of HL and FL students in Spanish-language courses (see Lefkowitz in press). This work characterizes the attitudes, beliefs, and experiences of learners, in addition to the perceptions and practices of instructors who serve HL and FL populations. Our findings largely parallel research demonstrating that Spanish-language instruction often fails to address the unique educational and socioaffective needs of HL students. Mismatches between writing-to-learn approaches and HL students’ real and perceived need to learn to write likely account for the failure of traditional instruction to serve this unique population effectively (Blyth 2003; Brinton, Kagan & Bauckus 2008; Roca & Colombi 2003; Valdés 2001; Valdés, Fishman, Chávez & Pérez 2006). In this chapter, we analyze views of writing processes that shape instructional practices in college-level FL and HL education in relation to the learning-towrite and writing-to-learn dimensions explored in this book. As Colombi and Roca (2003:â•›9) have pointed out, “one of the most important yet difficult aspects of Spanish language development for heritage speakers is academic writing.” To investigate continuities and discontinuities between the real and perceived needs

212 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

of HL students and the content and manner of Spanish-language instruction, we compiled data sources targeting (a) student and instructor attitudes toward, and perceptions of, L2 writing, (b) curricular content, (c) reported instructional practices, and (d) explicit and implicit beliefs about how to teach and learn L2 writing effectively. We initially focused on HL students’ attitudes and self-esteem issues; we subsequently examined instructors’ attitudes toward students’ speech varieties and literacy skills. Our investigation then broadened to encompass FL students’ beliefs and attitudes. In the present iteration of our study, we examine the following research questions, which target variables and processes involved in the learning and teaching of writing in Spanish with respect to the writing-to-learn/ learning-to-write interaction: 1. What models of L2 writing and learning to write are reflected in FL and HL students’ classroom experiences, beliefs, and perceptions of L2 instruction? 2. What models of L2 writing and learning to write are reflected in FL/HL instructors’ reported practices, beliefs, and perceptions of Spanish-language instruction? 3. In what ways do these experiences, practices, beliefs, and perceptions converge and diverge?

Method To address these questions, this investigation reflects a descriptive, heuristic, mixed-methods design (Brown & Rodgers 2002; Johnson & Christensen 2008; McKay 2006; Willis 2007). Following a concurrent triangulation approach, we simultaneously gathered quantitative and qualitative data and then systematically compared the two data sources to identify “convergence, differences, or some combination” (Creswell 2009:â•›213).

Participants Our three participant samples, profiled in Table 1, include 61 English-speaking (FL) students enrolled in university Spanish courses, 45 HL students enrolled in Spanish courses, and eight Spanish-language instructors – all from the same comprehensive, regional university in the western United States. The FL and HL cohorts are roughly comparable in demographic terms, with male students accounting for about one third of the sample and age ranges diverging moderately. A salient detail about the instructor pool not represented in Table 1 is that the sample was evenly divided between native speakers of Spanish and English.



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 213

Table 1.╇ Participant profile

Sex Age

Male Female Mean age (SD) Age range

FL students N = 61

HL students N = 45

Instructors N=8

18 43 21.4 (2.74) 18–34

15 30 23.8 (6.38) 18–22

4 4 NR NR

Of the eight professors, four had earned their doctoral degrees in literature; two reported a background in linguistics or a related field, and the remaining two had completed their terminal degrees in other disciplines. Five of the eight instructors indicated never having undergone any training in the teaching of writing.

Materials Among the instruments deployed in this study were dual versions of a comprehensive questionnaire administered to both FL and HL students. The survey, adapted from an instrument developed by Valdés et al. (2006), explores participants’ perceptions of the value of developing writing skills in Spanish, self-appraisals of oral and written language skills, attitudes toward varieties of Spanish, and beliefs about HL and FL students’ interactions. The HL version of the survey included 25 additional items focusing uniquely on HL students’ bilingualism and biliteracy, their use of Spanish and English across multiple linguistic environments, and their family backgrounds. Survey responses generated the quantitative data reported here, as well as responses to open-ended questions and prompts. Following guidelines proposed by Creswell (2007) and Fontana and Frey (2008), interviews with the Spanish professors consisted of a structured sequence of prompts yielding both quantitative results and a semi-structured sequence of open-ended prompts, which produced a corpus of qualitative data. Interviews queried instructors about their theoretical and philosophical orientations toward writing, L2 pedagogy, and the literacy development of FL and HL students. We likewise considered publicly available forms of evidence concerning professors’ instructional methods, including course syllabi, assignments, textbooks, and so on.

Procedures and analyses Owing to the inquiry-oriented nature of our research questions, the procedures deployed to analyze survey responses and interview extracts are descriptive.

214 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

Frequency data systematically highlighted themes that informed our analysis of interview material and constructed responses to survey prompts (Creswell 2009; Johnson & Christensen 2008). We established recurring categories, noted relationships among them, and interpreted them in light of our research questions (Silverman & Marvasti 2008). We pursued a concurrent triangulation model because of the rich insights that qualitative analysis brings to the interpretation of non-parametric quantitative findings (Morgan 2007). Such cross-validation methods make use of quantitative and qualitative tools “as a means to offset the weaknesses inherent within one method with the strengths of the other (or conversely, the strength of one adds to the strength of the other)” (Creswell 2009:â•›213).

Results and discussion Our analyses center around convergences and divergences observed between the perceptions of our HL and FL students with respect to the value of writing in their education and beyond; we likewise examine instructors’ reported beliefs and practices about the same issues, comparing these to those of students. Several of the themes introduced may not appear to relate directly to Spanish-language writing skills, but we believe that affective factors such as motivation and language attitudes are highly germane to student performance and to instructor perceptions of students’ literacy skills.

FL and HL students’ motivation for studying Spanish We first consider how FL and HL samples converge in terms of goals for studying Spanish. Table 2 reports students’ responses to statements about their reasons for enrolling in Spanish courses and the subskill areas of highest value to them. Results suggest that the two groups share several priorities, including the development of a range of skill areas in Spanish. Beyond their motivation to cultivate oral-aural and literacy skills, however, the FL and HL cohorts diverge in striking but not unanticipated ways (Draper & Hicks 2000; Hornberger & Wang 2008). Table 2 demonstrates, for instance, that HL students are by far the most concerned with enhancing their writing skills, whereas FL students identify speaking as the skill that they most urgently need to improve – a finding wholly consistent with Colombi and Roca (2003), who identified writing skills as the primary academic challenge for HL students. Apparent similarities between our FL and HL samples involve a complex combination of motivational and affective orientations. For example, FL students



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 215

Table 2.╇ FL and HL students’ skill assessments and motivation  for taking Spanish courses FL (N = 61) HL (N = 45) Proficiency in standard Spanish will be useful for my future education and career Skill areas most important for my future  Speaking education and career: Listening Reading Writing Speaking Skill areas that I would most like to improve: Listening Reading Writing

99%

98%

97% 85% 56% 56% 90% 56% 44% 43%

91% 73% 76% 76% 42% 13% 27% 87%

reported pursuing Spanish for utilitarian reasons, such as work and future careers; others reported integratively-oriented impulses, such as interacting with native speakers of Spanish, participating in tertulia (conversation table), appreciating Spanish-language visual media, reading literature, and so on (Dörnyei 2005; Gardner 2001). Specific reasons for pursuing university course work in Spanish naturally differed by sample, owing largely to HL students’ bilingual, bicultural socialization and ready access to both Spanish- and English-speaking discourse communities. Thus, whereas both FL and HL students reported a desire to enhance specific Spanish-language skills for school and career prospects, HL students’ emphasis on their Spanish literacy skills was decidedly more pronounced. Significance tests performed on responses to the skill-area statements shown in Table 2 suggest that FL and HL results for the first item (skill areas most important for education and career) are likely independent (χ2 = 6.38, df = 3, p < 0.095); results for the second item (skill areas in greatest need of improvement) are highly independent (χ2 = 54.40, df = 3, p < 0.000).

Perceptions of HL and FL students’ language, language use, and literacy skills To understand the context of students’ self-appraisals and beliefs about their language skills, we invited Spanish instructors to characterize their perceptions of€– and attitudes toward – HL students and their dialects, as well as toward FL students’ L2 abilities. Five of the eight professors reported that their expectations of HL students were different from those of FL students. We likewise asked instructors to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of their FL and HL students in subskill areas. Table 3 reports the frequency of these ratings, which coincided closely with HL students’ perceptions of their strong and weak competencies.

216 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

Table 3.╇ Instructor perceptions of HL and FL students’ strengths and weaknesses  (N = 8)* Listening Speaking FL students’ strongest skills FL students’ weakest skills HL students’ strongest skills HL students’ weakest skills

4 1 5 1

Reading

Writing

Grammar

3 1 0 2

1 4 0 6

3 1 0 2

1 5 8 1

* Participants were invited to elect multiple skill areas.

Table 4.╇ FL student skills self-appraisal (N = 61) I am a fluent speaker of Spanish. I am a fluent reader of Spanish. My comprehension of Spanish texts is very accurate. I write fluently in Spanish. My written Spanish is very accurate. My knowledge of Spanish grammar is very good. I have a large vocabulary in Spanish. When I write in Spanish, I translate from English.

6

5

4

3

2

1

M

SD

1 1 1 1 1 2 2 3

â•⁄ 6 â•⁄ 6 14 â•⁄ 4 â•⁄ 5 â•⁄ 7 â•⁄ 4 17

â•⁄ 8 15 21 15 16 21 23 13

16 17 14 19 16 21 16 15

21 15 â•⁄ 7 14 20 â•⁄ 9 14 â•⁄ 5

9 7 3 8 3 1 2 8

2.74 3.02 3.65 2.93 3.05 3.49 3.31 3.57

1.25 1.23 1.16 1.20 1.13 1.04 1.10 1.44

6 = Strongly agree 5 = Agree 4 = Somewhat agree 3 = Somewhat disagree 2 = Disagree  1 = Strongly disagree

Table 3 further indicates that instructors perceived HL students as decidedly more fluent speakers of Spanish, a trend pointing toward salient ways in which instructors’ views of FL and HL students diverge. When asked to rate their own skill areas in Spanish, FL students characterized their reading skills as the strongest, followed by grammar and vocabulary knowledge, as the frequencies and means in Table 4 indicate. FL students ranked their productive skills as low, with writing achieving only a slightly higher rating than speaking. It is noteworthy that FL students rated their fluency in reading and writing in Spanish as low relative to their accuracy. Not surprisingly, this profile contrasts sharply with the self-appraisals of HL students, all of whom claimed to speak Spanish “well” or “fairly well,” as Table 5 shows. In response to queries about their level of comfort as speakers and writers of Spanish, in addition to their sense of ease interacting with HL students (“native speakers”) and instructors, FL students often expressed insecurity and anxiety.



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 217

Survey extracts suggest not only inhibition and anxiety but also a palpable need for sustained practice in speaking, as the following extracts indicate: (1) In class is fine for reading and writing but I always get nervous when speaking my mind in class. Talking to my friends inside and outside class is fine with me. [FLS32] (2) In small groups. I feel uncomfortable speaking in large groups; easier and less intimidating to speak in groups of 2–4 people; feel comfortable reading and writing in most circumstances, especially if there is someone to help me [FLS34] (3) I never feel comfortable speaking Spanish. I only feel comfortable writing, for the most part. [FLS37] (4) I feel comfortable writing in Spanish to my friend or my teacher, even though I can still make mistakes. I rarely feel comfortable speaking Spanish to anyone … b/c I can’t think as fast, and I get self conscious. [FLS48] (5) I rarely feel comfortable speaking. I read and write well when I’m at home and it is quite (quiet). I need help from my professors frequently. [FLS53]

FL students’ frequent and consistent expressions of apprehension when faced with production in Spanish are highly consistent with studies of language learning anxiety (Arnold 1999; Horwitz & Young 1991; Young 1999). This small but emblematic sampling of FL students’ references to performance anxiety further suggests that learners highly value oral proficiency, in line with results reported in Tables 2 and 4. The high anxiety and importance that FL students associate with oral skills diverges from the greater level of comfort that they associate with writing in Spanish – in direct contrast to the views of HL students, who largely view their writing skills as the least sophisticated. Because of HL students’ unique bilingual and bicultural backgrounds, our survey posed somewhat different questions about their skills self-appraisals than those put to FL students; for the purposes of comparison, we constructed HL prompts to parallel the FL prompts as closely as possible. The questionnaire queried HL students about their encounters with English and Spanish in their daily lives – the latter to capture students’ literate behaviors outside of the university setting. Table 5 summarizes HL students’ evaluations of their bilingual skills;

. Here and throughout, extracts are transcribed verbatim as they appear in students’ handwritten questionnaire responses. We have bold-faced thematically salient passages that reference students’ attitudes, affective states, and confidence levels. FL student contributions are numerically coded; HL participant contributions are labeled with a pseudonym.

218 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

Table 5.╇ HL students’ bilingual skills self-appraisals (N = 45) Extremely well

Fairly well

Not very well

Not at all

38 (84%) 27 (60%) 23 (51%) 20 (45%)

â•⁄ 7 (16%) 18 (40%) 20 (45%) 23 (51%)

0 0 2 (4%) 2 (4%)

0 0 0 0

Understand spoken Spanish Speak Spanish Understand spoken English Speak English

Table 6.╇ HL students’ reported frequency of Spanish use (N = 45) I read in Spanish at home I write in Spanish at home I speak Spanish in my workplace*

Always

Often

Sometimes

Rarely

4 (9%) 3 (7%) 2 (4%)

â•⁄ 8 (18%) â•⁄ 8 (18%) 10 (22%)

19 (42%) 18 (40%) 13 (29%)

12 (27%) 15 (33%) 11 (24%)

* 6 (14%) not applicable or not reported.

Table 6 presents frequencies of students’ reported Spanish use at home and in the workplace. Congruent with research into HL students’ home language literacy habits and skills (Douglas 2008; Hornberger 1990, 2003; Valdés 2000), a majority of HL students (73%) reported reading in Spanish at home sometimes, rarely, or never; a slightly higher proportion (75%) reported writing in Spanish only infrequently at home. The infrequency of writing outside of school reported here may correspond with the high proportion of HL students (87%) who stated that they would most like to improve their Spanish-language writing skills (Table 2). Qualitative data from HL surveys revealed students’ recognition of the value of literacy in Spanish. The questionnaire asked HL students about the distribution of English and Spanish in their daily lives. Whereas students reported a limited need for Spanish-language literacy skills outside the university, participants indicated a need to read and write for practical reasons such as translating documents for family members, as in these extracts: (6) I talk with my friends and family members. Read Spanish literature – and write school work in Spanish [Jorge] (7) [I write] when translating letters, papers for people; class also; (listening to music in Spanish) [Hortensia] (8) When I’m in class studying or translating for a parent. [Gerardo] (9) I write in Spanish when in my Spanish classes, to my family in México when I write them letters, notes in church, and when I translate documents for my family members. I speak Spanish whenever I can because I will not forget my language this way, with friends, family and co-workers. [Verónica]



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 219

Instructors’ impressions of HL students’ language and literacy needs appear to coincide with students’ reportedly infrequent literacy-related activities outside of Spanish courses. As one professor claimed, “some students don’t have any experience with the written language.” We strongly suspect that “written language” here refers rather narrowly to written academic language and genres (cf. Lefkowtz in€press). We were struck by HL students’ frequent references to the practical uses of reading and writing in their everyday lives, such as translating and interpreting on behalf of family members, a practice that Weisskirch (2005, 2006) and Weisskirch and Alva (2002) called language brokering. These activities, which students variably described as “re-explaining,” “helping,” and translating information for family members into Spanish “when it’s necessary” seem to go unrecognized – at least by instructors – as legitimate or relevant literacy practices. Reading and writing in Spanish for many HL students serves salient instrumental purposes outside the classroom, although students may not view these functions as worthy (Draper & Hicks 2000; Mercado 2000; Valencia & Solórzano 2004). Fought (2003, 2006) argued that such brokering functions entail highly practical benefits, which are not only communicative but also cognitive and affective (Martínez 2006; Valdés et al. 2008; Weisskirch 2007). Brokering processes and skills may represent unÂ� recognized, underutilized resources that HL students could draw upon as they cultivate academic literacies, including the types of knowledge acquisition processes described by Hirvela (Chapter 3). Our study focuses primarily on HL students’ academic and non-academic literacy development in Spanish, yet we cannot overlook the role of English in partiÂ� cipants’ bilingual and biliterate repertoires. In surveys and interviews, HL students reported writing in English much more frequently than in Spanish, though they did not uniformly evince a high level of fluency, ease, or comfort. Survey responses offered by Jorge, Loreta, and Eufebia are common: (10) There are no circumstances that make me feel comfortable speaking, reading, and writing in English. [Jorge] (11) [I feel most comfortable] reading because I have an assent when speaking & I am not good in writing. [Loreta] (12) I prefer speak, read and write English just when I have to. [Eufebia].

In contrast, seven respondents alluded to English dominance in their responses to queries about the distribution of English and Spanish in their social interactions and literate activities. Reflections shared by Anabel and Ofelia on their sense of ease as users of English and Spanish exemplify this trend:

220 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

(13) I am [always] more comfortable with English than Spanish [Anabel] (14) I feel most comfortable reading and writing [in English]. [Ofelia]

A smaller number of HL participants, such as Natalia and Damiana, hinted at balanced bilingual and biliterate abilities, though they admitted using English more frequently than Spanish: (15) I feel comfortable in both but use English more than Spanish. [Natalia] (16) [I am comfortable] in all because I been living here most of my life, but I don’t want to lose my culture. [Damiana]

Alina’s response hints at a sense of linguistic security conditioned on the attitude and affect of her English-speaking interlocutors: (17) [I feel comfortable using English] when people make me feel comfortable, when they don’t show me a rare face, show me that they can’t understand … [Alina]

Instructional practices, student perceptions, and their influence  on learning to write We hypothesize that a recurring variable in HL students’ appraisals of their language use, bilingualism, and biliteracy involves self-esteem and the perceived prestige of their oral and written dialects. In particular, we have observed that HL students view themselves as less-than-skilled users of both Spanish and English. On this point, HL and FL students share self-consciousness and low linguistic confidence, although this low confidence is associated with different languages and realms of linguistic – and literate – competence. FL students expressed modest levels of confidence speaking and writing in Spanish (see Tables 2 and 4). In contrast, whereas HL students identified themselves as fluent speakers of Spanish (see Tables 2 and 5), they characterized their English skills as comparably weaker (see Table 6 and survey extracts presented above). Moreover, although the FL and HL students perceived their writing skills in Spanish to be weak (see Tables 2 and€4), a much higher proportion of HL students (87%) identified writing as the area in greatest need of improvement (see Table 2). Findings discussed below provide further evidence that HL students sense an urgent need to develop academic literacy skills in Spanish – in particular, facility with writing. Observations along these lines reflect low linguistic self-esteem among HL students, whose reflections about their language socialization and biÂ� literacy strongly suggest that they do not feature themselves as skilled users of either Spanish or English. Students may harbor attitudes of insecurity partly as a



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 221

response to classroom instruction. Impressions and opinions offered by instructors point toward attitudes and beliefs that parallel those of their HL students (Lefkowitz in press). We discovered remarkable similarities between instructor beliefs and conclusions drawn by Draper and Hicks (2000): Due to past emphasis on the teaching of the ‘standard’ dialect to [HL] learners, many teachers [view] their role as one of correcting the language used by their students; that what students bring with them to the classroom is not valid. This, coupled with the often negative societal attitudes toward these languages and the people who speak them, leads students to see no perceived value in something that is integral to what they are as people (Villa 1996; Valdés 1999).  (Draper & Hicks 2000:â•›22–23)

Romero (2000:â•›135) similarly observed that formal instruction may implicitly or explicitly degrade HL students’ home language varieties, and Zentella (2002:â•›328) referred to the elevation of prestige varieties at the expense of students’ home varieties as “dialect dissing.” When asked to report whether their performance expectations for HL students were different from their expectations for FL students, five instructors responded affirmatively; one replied in the negative, and two chose not to reply or did not know. To probe professors’ expectations of students’ language proficiency and use more deeply, we asked them to rate FL and HL learners’ proficiency in Spanish on a simple ordinal scale. Results appear in Table 7. These opinions do not necessarily contradict claims by a majority of instructors (five of eight) that they expected HL students to perform differently from FL students. Nonetheless, Table 7 strongly suggests that the standards applied to the two populations diverge – and potentially that HL students are perhaps held to higher standards. At the same time, as the instructor attitudes presented below Table 7.╇ Instructors’ overall ratings of FL and HL student proficiency Excellent Above average Average Below average Poor Not reported

FL students

HL students

0 1 4 2 0 1

1 6 0 0 0 1

. A Fisher’s exact test yielded a p-value (two-tailed) of 0.004, indicating a highly significant statistical association between students’ FL and HL status and instructors’ appraisals. The distribution of instructor assessments is significantly different for the FL and HL groups.

222 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

indicate, the presupposition that HL students are more proficient in Spanish (or that they should be more proficient in completing academic tasks such as writing papers) may lead to negative affective consequences. For example, instructors’ efforts to correct HL students’ speech and writing so that their production adheres to a prestige variety can be interpreted as “signs of disrespect or disregard” for HL students’ cultural identities and linguistic abilities (Lacorte & Canabal 2003). Moreover, whereas FL students may feel intimidated by HL students’ presumed “native” knowledge, HL students may “feel that monolingual Anglophone students have a better grasp of grammatical structures,” with the result that HL students’ self-esteem is negatively influenced by “apparent gaps in their formal knowledge” (Lacorte & Canabal 2003:â•›116). As for their beliefs about writing, Spanish instructors consistently expressed a strong concern for cultivating students’ metalinguistic knowledge – particularly that of HL students – and for providing expert intervention in responding to student texts. When queried about their instructional methods and feedback practices, most instructors implicitly or explicitly characterized their approach to the teaching of writing in traditional terms, highlighting the importance of formal accuracy and the reproduction of academic genres. Their goals for assigning writing tasks and providing corrective feedback uniformly involved eradicating ungrammatical patterns, rather than engaging students in the collaborative interaction described by Fiona Hyland (this volume, Chapter 8). In addition, five professors explicitly acknowledged that writing assignments in their advancedlevel Spanish courses featured familiar rhetorical patterns, such as narration, exposition, description, and argument, with narration and exposition the most frequently assigned modes. Similarly, six instructors acknowledged assigning “essays” or “compositions,” with only one indicating that she assigned less “academic” genres such as fiction, journalistic writing, and business correspondence. In other words, most instructors described practices that position writing not as a productive cognitive and expressive activity (cf. Hirvela, Chapter 3), but as a means of generating rhetorically prescribed texts for subsequent editing and correction (cf. Brown 2007). When invited to describe methods and strategies used to teach writing in their Spanish courses, professors listed nine distinct categories, shown in Table€8. Interestingly, the most frequently mentioned classroom procedure for teaching writing involved analyzing and critiquing student writing samples. Half of the instructors reported teaching grammar and vocabulary as part of writing instruction, a salient trend that consistently emerged in the interviews. Several professors claimed that their HL students were “not readers,” who could speak Spanish but not write in the language. A few instructors further noted that HL students



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 223

Table 8.╇ Instructional methods and procedures for teaching writing* Method/procedure Analysis of student writing Grammar presentation Vocabulary practice Peer response Intensive reading Extensive reading Oral grammar practice Dictation Literary analysis

Frequency 6 4 4 2 2 1 1 1 1

* Instructors were invited to describe all methods and procedures used.

do not know the texts of the Latin American or Peninsular literary canon. We found it revealing that, when invited to describe students’ academic literacy (and their own understanding of the construct), instructors found themselves unable to discuss the notion. Interview data elucidated professors’ views of literacy in Spanish and their perceived roles in promoting it among HL students. For example, instructors teaching composition courses described their curricular priorities in terms of enhancing HL students’ formal (primarily grammatical) knowledge. Their consistent stress on grammar, vocabulary, and spelling – echoing the observations of Draper and Hicks (2000) – may reflect an underlying presupposition that writing serves as a means to an end, rather than as a worthy literacy goal in itself. Instructors seldom characterized their approach to writing in Spanish courses as geared toward helping their students become writers. Rather, their mission seemed to be confined to eliciting written products whose errors they could correct.

Parallels and distinctions between instructor and student perspectives In many respects, the expressed beliefs, attitudes, and instructional practices of the Spanish instructors parallel the beliefs and perceived needs of HL students. The following self-appraisals from HL student interviews reflect remarkable similarity to the instructor beliefs sampled above: (18) [HL students] know how to speak but not how to write. [Antonio] (19) I use colloquial – I want to make it more standard … now I’m aware that I was poor in Spanish and need to improve it … I know that I’m limited to some parts of my language. [Ofelia]

224 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

(20) … I had no notion of [writing]. I made lots of mistakes as far as writing goes … I might be at a higher level as far as conversating and speaking. [César] (21) My writing is not professional. [Manuel]

In line with survey responses (see Table 2), these representative extracts visibly parallel instructor performance and proficiency assessments of HL students. These appraisals reflect a sharp divide between students’ oral-aural capabilities and their Spanish literacy skills (see Table 3), in addition to a pervasive sense that students’ home varieties are neither “standard” nor “correct.” These impressions lead us to speculate about whether, in implementing writing-to-learn practices, instructors are truly responding to their students’ genuine and felt needs. We likewise wonder if students express beliefs about their language and literacy needs in response to their instructors’ attitudes and methods. The parallels between HL students’ self-appraisals and instructors’ attitudes hint at a sort of pedagogical feedback loop in which students implicitly adopt their instructors’ attitudes; instructors, meanwhile, may accept at face value their students’ professed views, subsequently making instructional decisions on this basis. To scrutinize HL students’ viewpoints more closely, we questioned a subsample of HL students about their learning priorities and instructional methods that would promote their academic literacy skills – notably writing – in Spanish. Table 9 displays responses to a set of belief statements supplied by 21 of our 45 HL students. The themes addressed in these statements delve more deeply into the responses summarized in Table 2, specifically targeting HL students’ beliefs about how selected instructional strategies might enhance their writing skills in Spanish. As in Table 2, Table 9 results show that students overwhelmingly identified the development of reading, writing, and grammatical skills as high priorities, consistently expressing a preference for explicit, form-focused intervention on their writing. Like their instructors, HL students overtly expressed beliefs that align with a writing-to-learn perspective, perhaps as a reflection of how they had been taught writing. As noted above, HL students assessed their oral-aural proficiency in Spanish as higher than in English while expressing decidedly greater concern with their Spanish-language literacy skills – unlike their FL counterparts. HL students consistently reported insecurity about their writing skills and dissatisfaction with writing instruction. Their opinions reflect a commonly articulated felt need . We developed these items subsequent to early administrations of the survey, which we adapted from Valdés et al. (2006). These items address research questions arising after previous data analyses. The N reported here reflects the number of HL participants in our subsample.



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 225

Table 9.╇ HL students’ learning priorities and instructional preferences (N = 21) Belief statement

6

5

4

3

2

1

M

SD

It is important for me to develop excellent reading skills in Spanish.

16

3

0

1

0

1

5.48

1.25

It is important for me to develop excellent Spanish writing skills.

18

2

0

0

0

1

5.67

1.11

Developing a solid knowledge of Spanish grammar is important to me.

19

1

0

0

0

1

5.71

1.10

Developing a large vocabulary in Spanish is important to me.

15

5

0

0

0

1

5.52

1.12

When I write in Spanish, expressing my ideas fluently is a high priority.

12

7

1

0

0

1

5.33

1.15

The accuracy of my written Spanish is a high priority for me.

14

6

0

0

0

1

5.48

1.12

I am often nervous about getting instructor feedback on my Spanish writing.

â•⁄ 3

7

2

2

3

4

3.67€ 1.83

I expect instructor comments about the ideas expressed in my writing.

â•⁄ 7

8

2

1

1

2

4.62

1.60

I learn from instructor comments about the ideas expressed in my writing.

â•⁄ 9

8

1

0

1

2

4.86

1.59

Professors should correct my writing for grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics.

11

4

1

1

2

2

4.71

1.79

I learn from professors’ corrections on grammar, vocabulary, and mechanics.

13

3

1

2

1

1

5.05

1.53

I learn from the use of written correction symbols.

14

3

1

1

1

1

5.19

1.47

Multi-draft assignments are useful to me.

â•⁄ 9

6

3

1

1

1

4.86

1.42

In multi-draft assignments, each draft should be graded.

â•⁄ 5

5

2

4

2

3

3.90

1.79

I benefit from reading my peers’ writing assignments.

â•⁄ 1

7

9

0

3

1

4.00

1.26

I benefit from the feedback given by peers on my writing assignments.

â•⁄ 1

6

7

3

4

0

3.86

1.20

Peer editing should focus on ideas and organization.

â•⁄ 2

8

5

2

4

0

4.10

1.30

Peer editing should focus on grammar, vocabulary, spelling, and mechanics.

â•⁄ 8

6

4

2

1

0

4.86

1.20

6 = Strongly agree 5 = Agree 4 = Somewhat agree 3 = Somewhat disagree 2 = Disagree  1 = Strongly disagree

226 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

Table 10.╇ HL students’ beliefs about HL education Belief statement

Yes

No

NR

Schools and universities should offer special Spanish language courses for HL students.

34 10 1 (76%) (22%) (2%)

“Standard” varieties of Spanish should be taught to students from different Spanish-speaking countries.

27 13 5 (60%) (29%) (11%)

34 â•⁄ 8 3 Spanish courses for HL students should be different from courses for English-speaking students studying Spanish as a foreign language. (84%) (18%) (8%)

among HL students for more writing practice and a strong desire to make up for deficits in their prior training. This trend parallels Parodi’s (2008) observation that “writing is the most difficult part of language for heritage speakers to acquire because, on the one hand, their knowledge of Spanish is oral and, on the other hand, they became literate in English only” (Parodi 2008:â•›206). At the same time, HL respondents did not uniformly identify ways of addressing those perceived deficits. Table 9 indicates that many HL students perceived a need for traditional, grammar-based instruction in composition, and sometimes more of it – beliefs that may be influenced by their instructors’ approaches (Labov 2004; Scalera 2000; Valencia & Solórzano 2004). Nonetheless, when asked to weigh in on HL education and how to deliver it, HL students’ opinions pointed in divergent directions, as the opinions summarized in Table 10 suggest. While recognizing the need for academic instruction geared toward them and the value of a heteroglossic approach, some HL students nonetheless argued for a unitary register and pedagogical standard for writing and speech in Spanish. Most HL students also favored a prescriptive, writing-to-learn method, as these questionnaire and interview extracts suggest: (22) [HL students should] be taught the correct way to write and speak Spanish. [Lilia] (23) Just the standard should be taught. [Natalia] (24) [HL students] have to learn [Spanish] the proper way. [Samuel]

Such observations strongly hint that HL students view their oral and written language to be deficient relative to the pedagogical norm targeted in Spanish courses, again indicating low linguistic self-esteem. Participants uniformly embraced instruction designed specifically for HL students, nearly always acknowledging a gap between their oral and written varieties of Spanish and the instructional target (Table 10). Some HL students unequivocally assigned the highest prestige value to a single “standard” dialect: 42% of students named Peninsular Spanish



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 227

as a “standard” for HL education, although the vast majority of students are of Mexican descent. On the other hand, other students explicitly recommended a heteroglossic approach to designing HL Spanish courses (cf. Chavez 2003; Scalera 2000). In the view of several participants, Spanish instructors should: (25) focus on speaking Spanish to a variety of audiences. [Elena] (26) include culture [and] emphasize the importance of preserving [students’] language and not be afraid to use it. [Anabel] (27) take into consideration the fact that heritage students speak both English and Spanish… [Loreta] (28) Remember that grammer was not taught!!! [Nina] (29) [recognize that] most heritage students learn Spanish intermixed with slang words according to where their family is from. Different words mean different things to different people. [Estela] (30) [recognize] the variety of dialects… [Verónica]

In these extracts, HL students convey a desire to explain, justify, and describe their linguistic repertoires and the gaps between their home varieties and the pedagogical norm. Many comments also reflect an impressive degree of sociolinguistic sensitivity, including an awareness of how written registers diverge from speech registers. For example, one student suggested that instructors should recognize that “we have different understandings and ways … to explain different ideas. English speakers have to be taught rules; we can hear the rules but need further explanation of why we know them an how to impliment them” [Selena]. HL students’ curricular recommendations may imply that their oral and written production in Spanish has been devalued in classroom instruction, as we noted above. Somewhat paradoxically, HL students derogate their language varieties and their social value while appealing for recognition of the legitimacy of their speech and writing. Data reveal that students frequently exhibited a desire to align their linguistic production with a prestige variety or “standard code” (Fought 2006). At the same time that some HL students offered insightful ideas for designing sociolinguistically appropriate instruction for them, others expressed strong views about their need to be challenged as academic writers and concrete ideas about . Zentella (1997:â•›182–183) identified specific features that distinguish HL students’ varieties from the standard code: “(a) more marking of the imperfect on the auxiliary (e.g., estaba buscando) rather than on the main verb (buscaba); (b) absence of a variety of subordinate clauses; (c) increasing absence of the use of subjunctive mood” (cf. Fought 2006; Silva-Corvalán 1994).

228 John Hedgcock and Natalie Lefkowitz

a suitable HL curriculum (cf. Romero 2000; Sylvan 2000). For example, participants proposed that Spanish courses for HL students should: (31) increase difficulty level. [Esteban] (32) [be] more challenging. [Hortensia] (33) [provide] more challenging content … [e.g.,] Latin history and civilization … political science. [Verónica] (34) be more advanced than classes for those who are not very fluent in Spanish. [Marcia] (35) challenge … students to write professional papers in Spanish. [Gisela]

Unlike the student views and attitudes regarding productive HL instruction examined above, these thoughtful recommendations diverge markedly from the dominant perspectives of the instructors and their models of writing instruction. HL students’ academic, professional, and intellectual goals as readers and writers of Spanish have not been sufficiently addressed by the writing-to-learn instruction that has predominated in their education – although they largely believe that they need it. Students’ reflections on HL instruction also hint at frustration, explicitly calling for enhanced intellectual challenge, along the lines of a learning-to-write model in which they would cultivate critical rhetorical skills for engaging with academic content in novel ways (cf. Hirvela, Chapter 3, and Byrnes, Chapter€7 this volume).

Summary and implications Our three research questions sought to inquire into models of L2 writing and writing pedagogy as perceived by FL students, HL students, and instructors. Findings reveal consistent patterns of belief on the part of the students and educators in our study – as well as contradictions related to HL students’ attitudes toward HL literacy and writing instruction. All participants explicitly acknowledged salient distinctions between HL and FL students, yet professors’ instructional practices do not appear to be significantly differentiated for the two populations. That is, the practices of teachers and experiences of FL and HL students point consistently toward a writing-to-learn model of writing instruction in Spanish courses, with a strong and consistent emphasis on improving students’ grammar, spelling, and vocabulary use (cf. Lefkowitz in press). The distinct writing-to-learn orientation among the Spanish instructors in our study may result partly from their need to recognize that HL students “are not simply imperfect



Chapter 10.╇ Learning potential of writing in HLE 229

speakers of Spanish who have fallen short of the monolingual norm.” Rather, Spanish-speaking HL students in the U.S. “are members of speech communities in which a single language does not meet all their communicative needs” (Gutiérrez 1997:â•›35). Moreover, as Romero (2000:â•›135–136) argued, a “prescriptive, one-size-fits-all” FL curriculum designed for monolingual anglophone learners “disengages students who bring prior knowledge of the language” and ignores “the rich … varieties spoken by diverse ethnolinguistic groups.” Clearly, findings corroborate research stressing the importance of providing Spanish-language educators with suitable training in understanding and addressing the unique needs and expectations of HL students (Draper & Hicks 2000; Lacorte & Canabal 2005; Lefkowitz in press; Parodi 2008; Peyton 2008; Peyton, Ranard & McGinnis 2001; Romero 2000; Scalera 2000; Sylvan 2000). Opinions and insights supplied by HL participants strongly suggest that many of their educational needs – particularly in terms of developing academic and professional literacies in Spanish – are neither fully recognized nor accommodated in language and literature courses that are driven by a writing-to-learn theory. Though largely implicit, writing-to-learn assumptions may be deeply entrenched, perhaps as much among students as among instructors. Whether a writing-tolearn approach is optimal for developing the L2 communication and literacy skills of traditional FL students remains an open question. Our study nonetheless suggests that the writing-to-learn model alone does not sufficiently serve the unique cognitive, linguistic, or literacy needs of HL students, who expressed a strong desire to be challenged and who may therefore be much better served by undergoing instruction involving complementary methods informed by learning-to-write principles. Accordingly, the mismatch between the instructors’ approach to the teaching of L2 writing and the unmet writing needs of their heritage language students evidences the misalignments that may exist between the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of L2 writing in a given instructional setting.

References Arnold, J. (ed.). 1999. Affective Language Learning. Cambridge: CUP. Blyth, C. (ed.). 2003. The Sociolinguistics of Foreign-Language Classrooms. Boston MA: Thomson/Heinle. Brinton, D. M., Kagan, O. & Bauckus, S. (eds). 2008. Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging. New York NY: Routledge. Brown, H. D. 2007. Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach to Language Pedagogy, 3rd edn. White Plains NY: Pearson Education. Brown, J. D. & Rodgers, T. S. 2002. Doing Second Language Research. Oxford: OUP.

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Campbell, R. N. & Rosenthal, J. W. 2005. Heritage languages. In Handbook of Undergraduate Second Language Education, J. W. Rosenthal (eds), 165–184. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Chavez, M. 2003. The diglossic foreign-language classroom: Learners’ views on L1 and L2 functions. In The Sociolinguistics of Foreign-Language Classrooms, C. S. Blyth (ed.), 163–208. Boston MA: Heinle. Cohen, A. D. & Gómez, T. 2008. Enhancing academic language proficiency in a Spanish immersion classroom. In Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging, D. M. Brinton, O. Kagan & S. Bauckus (eds), 289–300. New York NY: Routledge. Colombi, M. C. & Roca, A. 2003. Insights from research and practice in Spanish as a heritage language. In Mi Lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States, A. Roca & M.€C. Colombi (eds), 1–21. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Creswell, J. W. 2007. Qualitative Inquiry and Research Design: Choosing among Five Approaches. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Creswell, J. W. 2009. Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches. Los Angeles CA: Sage. Dörnyei, Z. 2005. The Psychology of the Language Learner: Individual Differences in Second Language Acquisition. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Douglas, M. O. 2008. A profile of Japanese heritage learners and individualized curriculum. In Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging, D. M. Brinton, O. Kagan & S.€Bauckus (eds), 215–226. New York NY: Routledge. Draper, J. B. & Hicks, J. H. 2000. Where we’ve been: What we’ve learned. In Teaching Heritage Language Learners: Voices from the Classroom, J. B. Webb & B. Miller (eds), 15–35. Yonkers NY: American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. Edwards, C. & Willis, J. (eds). 2005. Teachers Exploring Tasks in ELT. Oxford: Palgrave Macmillan. Ellis, R. 2003. Task-Based Language Teaching and Learning. Oxford: OUP. Ellis, R. (ed.). 2005. Planning and Task Performance in a Second Language [Language Learning & Language Teaching 11]. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ferris, D. R. & Hedgcock, J. S. 2005. Teaching ESL Composition: Purpose, Process, and Practice, 2nd edn. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Fontana, A. & Frey, J. H. 2008. The interview: From neutral stance to political involvement. In Collecting and Interpreting Qualitative Materials, 3rd edn., N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (eds), 115–159. Los Angeles CA: Sage. Fought, C. 2003. Chicano English in Context. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Fought, C. 2006. Language and Ethnicity. Cambridge: CUP. Gardner, R. 2001. Integrative motivation and second language acquisition. In Motivation and Second Language Acquisition, Z. Dörnyei & R. Schmidt (eds), 1–19. Honolulu HI: Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center. Gutiérrez, J. R. 1997. Teaching Spanish as a heritage language: A case for language awareness. ADFL Bulletin 29(1): 34–36. Hidalgo, M. 1993. The teaching of Spanish to bilingual Spanish speakers: A problem of inequality. In Language and Culture in Learning: Teaching Spanish to Native Speakers of Spanish, B.€Merino, H. T. Trueba & F. A. Samaniego (eds), 82–93. London: Falmer. Hornberger, N. H. 1990. Creating successful learning contexts for bilingual literacy. Teachers College Record 92: 212–229.



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Parodi, C. 2008. Stigmatized Spanish inside the classroom and out: A model of language teaching to heritage speakers. In Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging, D.€M. Brinton, O. Kagan & S. Bauckus (eds), 199–214. New York NY: Routledge. Pew Hispanic Center. 2006. A Statistical Portrait of Hispanics at Mid-Decade. Washington DC: Pew Hispanic Center. (08 January, 2009). Peyton, J. K. (ed.). 2008. Frequently Asked Questions about Heritage Languages in the United States. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Peyton, J. K., Ranard, D. A. & McGinnis, S. (eds). 2001. Heritage Languages in America: Blueprint for the Future. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Roca, A. & Colombi, M. C. (eds.). 2003. Mi Lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Romero, M. 2000. Instructional practice in heritage language classrooms. In Teaching Heritage Language Learners: Voices from the Classroom, J. B. Webb & B. L. Miller (eds), 135–158. Yonkers NY: ACTFL. Savignon, S. 1997. Communicative Competence: Theory and Classroom Practice, 2nd edn. New York NY: McGraw-Hill. Scalera, D. 2000. Teacher beliefs and the heritage language learner: What will you teach your students? In Teaching Heritage Language Learners: Voices from the Classroom, J. B. Webb & B. L. Miller (eds), 71–85. Yonkers NY: ACTFL. Schwartz, A. M. 2003. ¡No me suena! Heritage Spanish speakers’ writing strategies. In Mi Lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States, A. Roca & M. C. Colombi (eds), 235–256. Washington DC: Georgetown University Press. Shrum, J. L. & Glisan, E. W. 2010. Teacher’s Handbook: Contextualized Language Instruction, 4th edn. Boston MA: Thomson/Heinle. Silva-Corvalán, C. 1994. Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: OUP. Silverman, D. & Marvasti, A. 2008. Doing Qualitative Research: A Comprehensive Guide. Los Angeles CA: Sage. Sylvan, C. E. 2000. Teachers’ belief systems in exemplary heritage language classes. In Teaching Heritage Language Learners: Voices from the Classroom, J. B. Webb & B. L. Miller (eds), 159–168. Yonkers NY: ACTFL. Valdés, G. 1991. Minority and majority members in foreign language departments: Toward the examination of established attitudes and values. ADFL Bulletin 22(2): 10–14. Valdés, G. 1999. Nonnative English speakers: Language bigotry in English mainstream classrooms. ADFL Bulletin 31(1): 43–48. Valdés, G. 2000. Spanish for Native Speakers: AATSP Professional Development Series Handbook for Teachers K-16, Vol. 1. New York NY: Harcourt. Valdés, G. 2001. Heritage language students: Profiles and possibilities. In Heritage Languages in America: Preserving a National Resource, J. Peyton, J. Ranard & S. McGinnis (eds), 37–80. Washington DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Valdés, G., Fishman, J. A., Chávez, R. & Pérez, W. 2006. Developing Minority Language Resource: The Case of Spanish in California. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Valdés, G., González, S. V., García, D. L. & Márquez, P. 2008. Heritage languages and ideologies of language. In Heritage Language Education: A New Field Emerging, D. M. Brinton, O.€Kagan & S. Bauckus (eds), 107–130. New York NY: Routledge. Valdés, G., Haro, P. & Echevarriarza, M. P. 1992. The development of writing abilities in a foreign language: Contributions toward a general theory of L2 writing. Modern Language Journal 76: 333–352.



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Valencia, R. R. & Solórzano, D. G. 2004. Today’s deficit thinking about the education of minority students. In Tongue-Tied: The Lives of Multilingual Children in Public Education, O.€Santa Ana (ed.) 124–133. Lanham MD: Rowman & Lifflefield. Villa, D. 1996. Choosing a ‘standard’ variety of Spanish for the instruction of native Spanish speakers in the U.S. Foreign Language Annals 29: 191–200. Weisskirch, R. S. 2005. The relationship of language brokering to ethnic identity for Latino early adolescents. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Science 27: 286–299. Weisskirch, R. S. 2006. Aspects of language brokering among Mexican American adults. Journal of Bilingual and Multicultural Development 27: 332–343. Weisskirch, R. S. 2007. Feelings about language brokering and family relations among Mexican American early adolescents. Journal of Early Adolescence 27: 545–561. Weisskirch, R. S. & Alva, S. A. 2002. Language brokering and the acculturation of Latino children. Hispanic Journal of Behavioral Sciences 24: 369–378. Williams, J. 2005. Teaching Writing in Second and Foreign Language Classrooms. New York NY: McGraw-Hill. Williams, J. D. 2003. Preparing to Teach Writing: Research, Theory, and Practice, 3rd edn. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Willis, J. W. 2007. Foundations of Qualitative Research: Interpretive and Critical Approaches. Thousand Oaks CA: Sage. Young, D. 1999. Affect in Foreign Language and Second Language Learning. Boston MA: McGraw-Hill. Zentella, A. C. 1997. Growing up Bilingual. Malden MA: Blackwell. Zentella, A. C. 2002. Latin languages and identities. In Latinos: Remaking America, M. M. SuárezOrozco & M. M. Páez (eds), 321–328. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

Conclusion

chapter 11

Reflections on the learning-to-write and writing-to-learn dimensions of second language writing* Lourdes Ortega

University of Hawai‘i

This final chapter explores main themes in the book and offers readers some critical points to ponder. I first highlight the intellectual and disciplinary influences which converge into the three dimensions that motivate the book€– learning to write (LW) and writing to learn content (WLC) or language (WLL)€– and which also cohere with broad professional and contextual locations for each. I€then turn to possible interconnections among the three dimensions. In some cases, LW, WLC, and WLL can become dividing lines that feed into compartmentalized professional or scholarly cultures and create misalignments between teacher and student understandings of the value and roles of second language (L2) writing. More often than not, however, the present collection demonstrates that the three views of LW, WLC, and WLL are closely related and can synergistically support instruction as well as enhance research insights. I then reflect on the importance of authenticity, needs, and writerly selves in the conceptualizations of LW, WLC, and WLL offered by authors across chapters. I close my reflections with some questions that are likely to spur future research capable of deepening our understanding of the roles that L2 writing instruction plays in uniquely supporting the synergistic learning of writing, content, and language.

Introduction Manchón invites readers of this book to think of second language (L2) writing from the vantage point of whether writing is the end goal of learning or whether * The writing of this chapter was in part supported by a fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in fall 2010. I am grateful also to the Editor, Rosa Manchón, for her comments and encouragement.

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it is a means to supporting learning in other areas. This move yields three alternative lenses that can be applied to L2 writing practice and scholarship: learning to write (LW) and writing to learn content (WLC) or language (WLL). I find this proposal useful because it helps us recognize both the distinctness and the interrelations of important concerns across contexts where L2 writing unfolds: Writing is at stake in LW, content is paramount in WLC, and language is central in WLL. The authors in the present collection have welcomed this analytical heuristic and have put it to good use in the exploration of their respective areas of interest within the increasingly mature and diverse field of L2 writing. In this closing chapter, I explore the main themes of the book and offer readers some critical points to ponder.

Different views of L2 writing, different disciplinary attunements Manchón (Chapter 1) argues that three views traverse L2 writing scholarship and practice, each entailing a prioritization of different emphases on writing, content, or language. Each view is then synthesized authoritatively by K. Hyland (Chapter€2), Hirvela (Chapter 3), and Manchón (Chapter 4). It is important to appreciate the extent to which this choice in emphases for the investigation and the teaching of writing is attuned to different disciplinary influences. In the LW perspective, L2 writing instruction seeks to foster good writing in more than one language and, correspondingly, L2 writing research seeks to illuminate how composing competencies develop in multilingual writers. In other words, the focus is on good writing and writer development. As K. Hyland (Chapter 2) chronicles, the perspective is informed by teaching philosophies and research theories imported from L1 composition studies that date back to the 1960s and 1970s. They are markedly cognitive-rhetorical because of the two constructs that gave them shape. The cognitive construct is process, and the rhetorical construct is voice. Thus, as a perspective for L2 writing, LW places at the center of attention the cognitive activity of the writer and her or his authorial voice; learning to write in an additional language means learning to be able to engage in sustained good writing processes, while the language employed in the writing event is an L2; and learning to be able to control, in the L2, the linguistic-rhetorical resources that allow for the successful fashioning of a desired authorial voice. K. Hyland recounts how the LW view has diversified beyond the initial cognitive-rhetorical concerns, giving way to other more recent lines of work that are grounded not only in formal linguistic-textual emphases, but in discourse-, genre-, and corpus-oriented interests that pursue the specification of the functional-textual-rhetorical resources needed in competent writing. This expansion



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has made the focus of LW encompass not only process and voice, but also particularly discourse and eventually readers as well. The intellectual and epistemological expansion, insofar as it is supported by corpus linguistic analyses of the kinds spearheaded by K. Hyland, is strongly specific to L2 studies. It is, at the same time, attuned to the post-process turn that began in L1 composition studies already during the 1980s (e.g., Berlin 1988), and which made many L1 scholars distance themselves from process-oriented and expressivist views of composition and turn instead towards more social and political (and more recently postmodern) understandings of composition, rhetoric, and writing as social literacies. A logical step in the expanded LW viewpoint (in L1 as in L2) has been to direct attention to how novices learn to make sense of writing as shaped by social demands associated with their surrounding contexts and the audiences they imply, a topic investigated by Leki (Chapter 5; see also Leki 2007). As a corollary, an expanded view of LW also focuses on the developmental process of writers who learn to write in disciplinary genres and like specialists in a given area, such as writing like an engineer in the L1 (Winsor 1996) or writing in English as an additional language for publication in international fora across specialized academic fields (e.g., Lillis & Curry 2010). One such context for LW within the high-stakes parameters of academic publication is examined critically by Canagarajah (Chapter 6). The second perspective identified by Manchón is WLC. Research on this dimension of L2 writing is synthesized by Hirvela (Chapter 3). With regard to instruction, WLC seeks to support good study skills and to foster academic achievement outcomes through activities that involve writing in more than one language. With regard to research, it seeks to illuminate ways in which newcomers in a given educational milieu both negotiate demands and leverage opportunities associated to writing in the (new) language of the (new) institution. Unlike LW, which has undeniable origins in L1 composition studies, WLC can be considered a specific creation of the L2 writing field, historically influenced by the burgeoning of the fields of English for Specific Purposes and English for Academic Purposes. In the process, however, it nicely converges with the Writing Across the Curriculum movement (Bazerman & Russell 1994) that sprung out of LW L1 traditions, when compositionists began looking beyond the process and the writer (as described above in the first LW dimension) and recognized the literacy demands students face across subject-matter courses related to the learning and creation of new subject-matter content through writing as well as the learning of discipline-specific€writing. As manifested in L2 writing studies, WLC puts forth the reader as paramount in the writing event, since readers (including imagined or projected audiences of instructors, content experts, and other gate-keepers) are those who decide what content must be learned and those who ultimately judge whether that content

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has been learned appropriately with the aid of writing. Accordingly, this perspective has helped develop the construct of audience in specific L2 writing terms, as discourse communities and communities of practice (e.g., Tardy 2009). It has also expanded our notion of what counts as “writing.” Namely, a traditional understanding of writing tends to delimit the phenomenon to school-sponsored composition genres (such as the academic essay), general academic genres (such as the research paper), or traditional literary genres (such as the creative short story or the poem). By contrast, as Hirvela (Chapter 3) notes, the WLC perspective directs attention to less traditional modes of writing that are embedded in study skills, such as note-taking, summarizing, powerpoint creation, or group study via chatting. Ultimately, the WLC view evokes emerging experts who are students of some content, and who use writing as an aid to substantially advance their expertise through new content learning and through processes of creation of new content. These emergent experts must also learn to write about this content with a rhetorical authority that makes their claim to expertise convincing to readers, something that ultimately makes WLC connect with LW and, to a lesser extent, to WLL. Although none of the empirical studies in the present collection is devoted to WLC, the choice of content-while-writing takes on importance across chapters, in the form of either cultural content (German culture broadly conceived for Byrnes Chapter 7), subject-matter content (various academic subjects for Leki Chapter 5; academic content for Manchón & Roca de Larios Chapter 9; academicprofessional content for Hedgcock & Lefkowitz Chapter 10), or disciplinary content (Tamil historical and literary studies for Canagarajah Chapter 6). The third perspective submitted by Manchón for consideration in this book, the WLL perspective, is the most decidedly L2-specific of the three, as it focuses on the potential of writing to support and enhance language learning outcomes. Manchón (Chapter 4) maps out the new intellectual space of WLL. She identifies Cumming (1990) as a precursor, but the first formal appearance of WLL as a specific dimension for L2 writing research is owed to Manchón and Roca de Larios (2007). The WLL perspective reflects an interest that has been mounting in recent years, albeit not always free from tensions (Ferris 2010), in maximizing the interfaces between the two fields of L2 writing and second language acquisition (SLA). WLL seeks to carve out a substantive and valued role for writing in L2 classrooms, elevating it from a convenient way to practice grammar and vocabulary to a site for language development. The WLL view calls for new L2 writing constructs, such as feedback for accuracy and feedback for acquisition, pushed written output, reformulation, written languaging, noticing activity during composing, depth of processing during composing, and so on (see Manchón Chapter 4). These constructs, once defined and specified empirically and theoretically through future work, will



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allow researchers to better explain what Manchón has termed the language learning potential of L2 writing. Perhaps because of its affiliation with SLA, the WLL perspective tends to place the cognitive and the text at the center stage of research attention. For instance, F.€Hyland’s (Chapter 8) main interest is in understanding students’ beliefs and attitudes towards teacher feedback ultimately in order to ascertain its instructional value to support linguistic accuracy and development (operationalized as amount and quality of teacher-prompted revision). At the same time, similar to the LW view, the WLL perspective is rapidly expanding beyond the cognitive and textual focus, thanks to the recognition that the language learning potential of writing is surely moderated by a researcher’s theory of language as a social resource, where linguistic and genre repertoires shape each other (Byrnes Chapter 7); by socialaffective factors related to the writer-reader relationship (F. Hyland Chapter 8); and by the social and contextual influences of teacher and instruction and their impact on conceptualizations of writing activity and goals (Manchón & Roca de Larios Chapter 9). As Manchón (Chapter 4) observes, the introduction of sociocultural motivations for explaining the meditational role of writing in supporting additional language learning is likely to bring about further expansion of what is researchable under the WLL view in the future.

Locating professional and contextual influences for LW, WLC, and WLL The intellectual and disciplinary influences just described also cohere with broad professional and contextual locations that are different for each view. The LW view prevails in the professional philosophies of composition programs, which are usually housed in university English departments in the United States. LW is therefore often associated, on the one hand, with the needs met (and created) by freshman composition courses (Matsuda et al. 2006), which all college students take early in their university years and, on the other hand, with the life of writing centers (Boquet 1999; Williams 2004), where tutors, who have been charged with the task of developing better writers, engage in talk around writing with students who may walk in from across an entire institution with dauntingly varied writing needs. The WLC perspective, on the other hand, with its overarching concern with content learning and academic achievement, is likely to be seen in English for international study support units (particularly catering to students at the level of advanced specialized degrees such as the master’s or the doctorate) that have proliferated in English-medium institutions of higher education – and, as mentioned earlier, in university-wide Writing Across the Curriculum programs that cut across departments and thus disciplinary lines, in this way intersecting with

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more general LW efforts. Finally, WLL is recognizably oriented towards the realities of language classrooms, particularly in elective language education that takes place in foreign language settings, be it in pursuit of acquiring English as an international language in countries that Kachru (1990) defined as belonging to the expanding circle, or in the service of learning a foreign language other than English for personal, intellectual, and professional advancement in a wide number of national and institutional settings. This is in contrast with both the LW and the WLC perspectives, which are intimately connected with the educational landscapes of writers who are linguistic minorities in a given context. Furthermore, geographically speaking, the first two views of LW and WLC may be easier to find in the United States and other English-majority settings. In fact, there is a likely bias towards the United States specifically in the educational landscapes for LW and the scholarship they generate. As Foster and Russell (2002) note, in other countries around the world, LW in L1 tends to happen – if it happens in the form of explicit instruction at all – earlier, during the years of compulsory schooling, as part of adolescents’ general character and citizenship education (see, for example, the study of LW in high schools in China and the United States by Li 1996). While also strongly oriented towards writing in English as an additional language, the WLC perspective spreads across the varied geography of English-medium higher education, which reaches well beyond the United States or even countries where English is a majority language (Tollefson & Tsui 2004). By comparison, the WLL view may arise particularly naturally in foreign language contexts, that is, in settings where access to the target language is limited outside the classroom, whether the target language is English or some other foreign language. Thus, L2 writing scholarship that is WLL oriented is likely to focus on foreign language writers and to broaden the scope of inquiry to target languages other than English.

Misalignments Given the disciplinary and professional differences just highlighted, it is not surprising to encounter cases when one of the three views takes over the other two. In such instances, LW, WLC, or WLL can become dividing lines that feed into compartmentalized professional or scholarly cultures. Multilingual writers stand to lose when compartmentalization is so extreme in a given context that it leads to a misalignment between teacher and student in the prevalent view of L2 writing espoused by each. The present collection offers a most blunt demonstration of this danger in the study by Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (Chapter 10). These authors investigate the



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problems generated by the mismatch between an exclusive WLL outlook on L2 writing held by instructors of Spanish as a foreign language and the pressing but unmet LW needs of their heritage language students. The Spanish instructors at this university had arguably implicitly learned to look at L2 writing solely through the WLL lens in their daily work with traditional foreign language students, whose expectations and needs centered around oral communicative competencies. As a consequence of this unexamined professional compartmentalized view, the strong orientation towards LW of their heritage language students, which were obvious to the researchers, remained invisible to the teachers. Familiar tensions documented in past L2 writing studies may be reinterpreted fruitfully as cases of misalignments among prevalent L2 writing views held by key actors in a given socio-educational setting. For example, the conflicted relationship towards L2 writing experienced by Yang, a Chinese woman studying nursing in the United States whose story Leki (2003) documented, may have originated in a mismatch between her own predominant view of school-sponsored writing as WLL and real-world writing as WLC, on the one hand, and her professors’ LW philosophies, on the other. Her nursing professors constantly placed the emphasis on school-like good writing, which to them required linguistically accurate but also overall “educated, good” writing, even when rehearsing hospital genres for pedagogical purposes. For Yang, on the other hand, writing had a utilitarian role in real-world hospitals which – in her mind – was entirely disconnected to any display of “good literacy education.” This certainty stemmed from her past expertise as an experienced doctor in China for many years. Her more recent experiences as an English as a second language university student, in addition, had made salient to her only the WLL dimension when it came to in-school English writing, making her identify writing narrowly with the practice of vocabulary and grammar. The subtle misalignment was compounded by Yang’s forced-upon novice role as a nursing apprentice at the time of the research, which made her medical content expertise invisible to her teachers. This throws into sharp relief the intimate connection in the complex process of writing development among content, ownership of content, and identity, a WLC issue poignantly discussed by Hirvela (Chapter 3). Another extreme case of misalignment between student and teacher views of writing may have been F. Hyland’s (1998, see also Chapter 8) Samorn, a Thai woman doing an MBA in her mid-thirties in New Zealand. Hyland reports Â�Samorn’s deep distress with her teacher’s feedback because it didn’t contain any praise of what she perceived to be one of her greatest strengths in English: grammar. Instead, the teacher concentrated on other issues, such as organization and rhetorical style:

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[…] at the first time I feel confident of my writing because I think that my grammar- my tense and my plural and verb use with plural, with singular is OK. But when the feedback come out, teacher doesn’t look enough in that grammar. The grammar is not the most important thing for her, so she check in the coherence, in introduction, in something else. […] I think that my grammar is good but I didn’t get any comments that ‘oh your grammar is good, but you still have to, you still have to correct about something like this’ But all the comments come that my writing is not so good, so I feel that everything is poor. […] I think that at least she should admire me some points. […] From that time I discouraged a lot and I feel don’t like writing.  (F. Hyland 1998:â•›277–278)

It can be said that Samorn held a WLL view of writing while her teacher implicitly corresponded with a LW view, with dire consequences in terms of creating demotivation. Once again, the misalignment was greatly complicated by identity, in that Samorn’s view of self as an accomplished grammar learner was invisible to the teacher.

Synergies and interfaces among the three views More often than not, however, the three views of LW, WLC, and WLL are closely related and form a triadic heuristic that, when applied together, can both support instruction and enhance research insights. In fact, most chapters in the present book attest to the synergies and interfaces among LW, WLC, and WLL. The most striking and successful synergies are reported in four quite different contexts. Leki’s (Chapter 5) respondents are English as a second language Â�users negotiating higher education degrees that must be carried out in an EnglishmediumÂ� and English-dominant institutional culture. Even though perhaps the LW dimension is a priority in most of such contexts, it turned out to seamlessly lead to the students’ discovery and appreciation of WLL view of L2 writing in this case. Canagajarah’s (Chapter 6) writer is a seasoned multilingual writer who has ample experience with publication, and in his case the three perspectives are blended and indistinguishable. Byrnes’ (Chapter 7) setting for L2 writing is Â�collegelevel German as a foreign language, where the WLL view typically dominates; yet she offers a successful, strong genre rationale (i.e., LW) that is coupled with a rationale for sustained content learning (i.e., WLC). Likewise, Manchón and Roca de Larios (Chapter 9) also reported how in a college-level English as a foreign language context students and their teacher co-oriented and enabled together synergies between LW and WLL. LW was the perspective from which the writing tasks and the pedagogy of the English for Academic Purposes course were conceived by the teacher and attended to by the students, yet the students’ own



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emerging goals and conceptualization of successful (and enjoyable!) writing apprenticeship afforded a central place to the language learning potential of writing and other WLL dimensions. There are, therefore, diverse contexts such as those described in this volume by Leki, Canagarajah, Byrnes, and Manchón and Roca de Larios, where writing may occur in ways that reveal the many intersections among LW, LC, and WLL, rather than their distinctness. As Leki succinctly puts it, “learning-to-write and writing-to-learn feed each other in ever expanding cycles” (Chapter€5:â•›105). These authors’ treatments are good reminders that, as with all categorization efforts, there is a need to go the full circle, from the whole of L2 writing realities in given contexts, to sharp analysis, to a final synthesis effort that is richer because of the mediating analytical step on which it rests. After all, writing, content, and language are all three present by necessity in all of L2 writing, as in L1 writing. We always write about content and through language. The added complexity when developing writers are emergent L2 users is that they may be simultaneously (a)€learning and creating content, (b) learning to write about it, and (c) learning to use a new language both to learn and create the content and to write about it. If this is so, then writing, content, and language can be profitably looked at separately through the different LW, WLC, and WLL analytical lenses, but they must ultimately also be fruitfully brought together.

Authenticity and needs Across chapters, authenticity and needs are two oft-invoked pillars on which authors lay their L2 writing instructional and research efforts. In some chapters, the weight of authenticity and needs is immediate and rather concrete. Thus, Hedgcock and Lefkowit (Chapter 10) identify needs (or rather, unmet needs) as the source of the problems uncovered in the context they investigate. The Spanish as a foreign language instructors at this university were blinded by their exclusive WLL outlook on L2 writing and did not see the relevance of addressing the very different needs of the more recent but important presence of heritage language students in their classrooms, before mostly inhabited by foreign language learners only. The kinds of authentic and needs-oriented genres Hedgcock and Lefkowit’s heritage language students longed for were at the center of the context Leki (Chapter 5) explored in her survey study. She reports on the resources derived from prior literacy experiences that international students bring to a new institutional setting in order to make sense of and negotiate new needs for writing. Much of the knowledge about both L1 and English writing uncovered in the survey was associated with apparently authentic genres, such

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as note-taking, email writing, and research publication. Leki also reports that, while there was great variability among respondents regarding the sophistication of their notions about writing, most were rather adept at gauging the usefulness of past experiences and past instruction, for example recognizing the minimal relevance to their present needs of rather inauthentic teaching points, such as the five-paragraph essay. In other chapters, by contrast, authenticity and needs appear to have a more theoretical and diffuse meaning that is nonetheless equally important to the authors. Both K. Hyland (Chapter 2) and Byrnes (Chapter 7) advocate for a genre approach to L2 writing. They agree that the ideal unit of analysis for L2 writing instruction as well as research is genre, as opposed to tasks and content (as a purely WLC perspective would probably have it) or language forms (as a purely WLL view would perhaps posit). The reason for this choice, K. Hyland reminds us, is that the study of genre offers authentic (as opposed to intuited) knowledge of the rhetorical demands placed on specific groups and communities of L2 writers in the real world (defined as the world beyond the classroom) and on the patterned texts students need or will need to produce and the contexts and discourse communities in which those texts exist. Byrnes (Chapter 7) further argues that a systemic functional linguistic approach to the development of L2 writing offers a more authentic explanation for what written communication does, namely linking language and content in ways that mediate the interpretation and organization of human experience (p. 22). The meaning-making resources that the systemicfunctional linguistic approach to genre makes available can then be appropriated by engaged L2 writers, as she shows. Also contributing to the success of the approach described is the concrete curricular expectation that students will eventually be prepared to do study abroad sojourns at German universities. Again, needs come in, as it is this institutional expectation that creates a powerfully felt learner need for academic literacy that takes these German as a foreign language students well beyond just oral competence in the L2. Following a rather different theoretical and practical rationale, Manchón and Roca de Larios (Chapter 9) argue that the strong appreciation for the WLL perspective that was reported by students in their context emerged most likely because a concerted pedagogical focus on the language learning potential of writing addresses one of the most authentic purposes for writing for their English as a foreign language college students, which is to improve their language competencies. In fact, it is common to hear L2 writing researchers who work in foreign language contexts lament the lack of pressing, authentic, real-world needs that students feel when asked to write in the target language (e.g., Rinnert & Kobayashi 2009; Sasaki 2009). These researchers have found that study abroad experiences of some length are particularly helpful in opening up foreign language writers’ imagination to



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new needs and novel authentic purposes for L2 writing, thus radically improving their motivation to write often and to become better writers. Yet Manchón and Roca de Larios (Chapter 9) are able to show a heightened sense of purposeful writing and engagement with felt authentic needs among their students, who experienced L2 writing instruction in their own domestic contexts only.

Complicating the picture: Writerly selves In the end, however, the richest lessons about authenticity and needs can be gleaned when the research delves into writers’ experiences, perceptions, beliefs, and goals. At the heart of how the three views of L2 writing can be best synergistically exploited in educational contexts lies issues of writer identity and ownership, perhaps best surmised in what Hirvela (Chapter 3) calls “the writerly selves that L2 students bring to writing in the target language” (p. 54). Remarkably, all empirical chapters in the book include some data reporting on writers’ perspectives. Some authors in the book engage with a broad social-affective focus on the writer. Thus, Byrnes (Chapter 7) offers us a glimpse of Jill’s engagement with writing and her exhilaration at experiencing its WLL potential in ways that were inseparable from genre, audience, and content learning. Manchón and Roca de Larios (Chapter 9) report on their students’ increasing sense of an emerging, more sophisticated conceptualization of writing as the year-course progressed. Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (Chapter 10) included open-ended responses from their survey that show the degree of dissatisfaction the heritage language students felt towards’ their instructor’s exclusive WLL approach. They also capture evidence of the painful self-construction of heritage students as “less-than-skilled users” of their own languages. As a respondent called Ofelia put it: “I use colloquial€– I want to make it more standard … now I’m aware that I was poor in Spanish and need to improve it … I know that I’m limited to some parts of my language” (p.€223). Undoubtedly, these perceptions are partly internalized from similar messages and words heard many times over from present and past teachers. A number of chapters make central use of writer data and offer poignant lessons that come from authors’ efforts at accessing emic insights through their research and offer several important lessons that are worth enumerating here. One lesson is that affect and identity can override needs and authenticity considerations. Consider, for example, Nam, one of Herrington and Curtis’ (2000) participants, discussed by Hirvela (Chapter 3). Nam would have preferred to write about spiritual matters and in very different ways from the ways embraced by psychologists. His solution was one of passive resistance, as intimated by his comment “It’s quicker to write their way, than my own” (p. 109; cited by Hirvela, p.€50). It is

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unlikely that any amount of authenticity or needs analysis – not even the most insightful genre description of psychology writing! – could have solved the problem for this writer, who had little room for identity negotiation in this context for WLC and thus exercised his agency via disinvested accommodation. Another lesson to take from a writerly selves’ emic perspective is that writing experiences can be quite differently lived by students, even in the same instructional contexts. A good example of this is the diversity of goals and affective reception of teacher’s feedback that F. Hyland (Chapter 8) uncovered in her study. Maho’s appreciation and even flow for content generation during writing and her eagerness to see teacher engagement with that content contrasted with Keith’s risk taking attitude when exploring language at his cutting-edge of expression and his energetic request from the teacher of what Manchón (Chapter 4) would call feedback for acquisition, which in turn was rather different from Liang’s compliant pursuit of teacher-requested revisions coupled with her defiant use of her intimate social network beyond the teachers for language support and learning. Yet another important lesson is not to underestimate the agentive sophistication of student-writers. Most impressive here is the genre knowledge sophistication cultivated by Leki’s (Chapter 5) respondents, even more so in view of their having been indoctrinated into the five-paragraph essay formula, a staple of LW pedagogy in many English second and foreign language teaching contexts. These college L2 writers were not limited deterministically by the formulaic knowledge of writing they have derived from past formal instruction. Finally, particularly intriguing is the view of the writer conjured by Suresh Canagarajah (Chapter 6). In his work, writers are construed as constantly changing languages, audiences, and worlds, and always in productive tension with the ideologies of those multiple worlds. Canagarajah’s argument helps us see needs critically and with a transformational agenda in mind. Multilingual writers can achieve an in-between state of competency where they have the knowledge and agency needed to succeed at rhetorical negotiations and produce effective texts which, to only slightly paraphrase him, nudge readers to shift to other discursive preferences, even as the writer shifts to theirs (p. 124). That is, simultaneous resistance and accommodation are perfectly possible for Canagarajah. This echoes the position of many postcolonial and post-structuralist feminist scholars, who see the feasibility of attaining a difficult but transformative difference-in-equality self-recognition (Bhabha 1994) and of traveling to others’ worlds to discover resistance in oppression (Lugones 2003).



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Future questions for the study of learning to write and writing to learn Some questions can be asked as L2 writing researchers embark on future investigations inspired by the understanding of writing emphases as centered around LW, WLC, and WLL views. Given the serious potential harms of misalignment in L2 writing views as well as the productive dynamics of interconnections captured in the present collection, future research may fruitfully consider the following sets of questions. First, might it be, perhaps, that the best L2 writing research and L2 writing teaching are characterized by an ultimately symbiotic relationship among LW, WLC, and WLL? If so, how can this relationship be engineered and supported in contextually appropriate ways, through educational practice and through research? Second, what constellation of conditions in what contexts can explain harmful cases of compartmentalization and misalignment of views about writing? And can a better understanding of these conditions help researchers suggest respectful and realistic ways of destabilizing, perhaps even disentangling, misalignments when they occur? Finally, how can research attention to the language learning potential of writing help illuminate the ways in which writing is present in many recognizable and more hidden forms in almost all educational contexts for L2 acquisition (Harklau 2002), thus extending bridges across disciplinary boundaries, both making WLL become a more central concern in L2 writing scholarship and making SLA theory and research grapple with L2 writing as a site of language learning? A plausible direction that can guide future research along the above three sets of questions is the hypothesis that careful negotiation and optimization of authenticity and needs are at the heart of the best cases where LW, WLC, and WLL enter a productive, symbiotic relationship, or when “learning-to-write and writing-to-learn feed each other in ever expanding cycles” (Leki, Chapter 5:â•›105). As Leki argues, the inside view of writers compels us to recognize that students do not come to the institutionalized experience of L2 writing as blank slates – cognitively, linguistically, or affectively. Instead, they bring with them often very intense and defined positions and beliefs about L2 writing and about language learning. Student-writers do not live in a social vacuum either, and their lives can change and make their writing and language learning needs and their sense of what is worthwhile and authentic also wax and wane over time. In all cases, together with needs and authenticity, identity and agency of the writerly selves stand out as important influences to contend with in future research that is capable of deepening our understanding of the roles that L2 writing instruction plays in uniquely supporting the synergistic learning of writing, content, and language.

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References Bazerman, C. & Russell, D. R. (eds). 1994. Landmark Essays on Writing Across the Curriculum. Davis CA: Hermagoras Press. Berlin, J. 1988. Rhetoric and ideology in the writing class. College English 50: 477–494. Boquet, E. H. 1999. Our little secret: A history of writing centers, pre- to post-open admissions. College Composition and Communication 50: 463–482. Cumming, A. 1990. Metalinguistic and ideational thinking in second language composing. Written Communication 7: 482–511. Ferris, D. R. 2010. Second language writing research and written corrective feedback in SLA: Intersections and practical applications. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 32: 181– 201. Foster, D. & Russell, D. R. (eds). 2002. Writing and Learning in Cross-national Perspective: Transitions from Secondary to Higher Education. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Harklau, L. 2002. The role of writing in classroom second language acquisition. Journal of Second Language Writing 11: 329–350. Hyland, F. 1998. The impact of teacher written feedback on individual writers. Journal of Second Language Writing 7: 255–286. Kachru, B. B. 1990. The Alchemy of English: The Spread, Functions, and Models of Non-Native Englishes. Champaign IL: University of Illinois Press. Leki, I. 2003. Living through college literacy: Nursing in a second language. Written Communication 20: 81–98. Leki, I. 2007. Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development. Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Li, X. 1996. ‘Good writing’ in Cross-cultural Context. Albany NY: State University of New York Press. Lillis, T. M. & Curry, M. J. 2010. Academic Writing in a Global Context: The Politics and Practices of Publishing in English. London: Routledge. Manchón, R. M. & Roca de Larios, J. 2007. Writing-to-learn in instructed language learning contexts. In Intercultural language use and language learning, E. Alcón Soler & M. P. Safont Jordà (eds), 101–121. Dordrecht: Springer. Matsuda, P. K., Cox, M., Jordan, J. & Ortmeier-Hooper, C. (eds). 2006. Second-language Writing in the Composition Classroom: A Critical Resource Book. Boston MA: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Tardy, C. 2009. Building Genre Knowledge. West Lafayette IN: Parlor Press. Tollefson, J. & Tsui, A.â•›B.â•›M. (eds). 2004. Medium of Instruction Policies: Which Agenda? Whose Agenda? Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Williams, J. 2004. Tutoring and revision: Second language writers in the writing center. Journal of Second Language Writing 13: 173–201. Winsor, D. 1996. Writing like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education. Hillsdale NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Contributors’ biodata

Heidi Byrnes is Distinguished Professor of German at the German Department, Georgetown University. Her research, scholarship, and teaching address a range of issues pertaining to adult instructed second language learning and teaching, with a particular emphasis on German. This general interest has led to a focus on the development of advanced levels of literacy in non-native languages in a variety of areas. Her books include Advanced Language Learning: The Contribution of Halliday and Vygotsky (Continuum), Educating for Advanced Foreign Language Capacities: Constructs, Curriculum, Instruction, Assessment (with Heather WegerGuntharp and Katherine Sprang, Georgetown University Press), Advanced Foreign Language Learning: A Challenge to College Programs (Heinle Thomson), and The Longitudinal Study of Advanced L2 Learning (with Lourdes Ortega, Rouletdge). Suresh Canagarajah is Professor of English and Applied Linguistics at Penn State University. His research interests span bilingualism, discourse analysis, academic writing, and critical pedagogy. His research articles have appeared in the professional journals such as TESOL Quarterly, College Composition and Communication, Language in Society, Written Communication, World Englishes, Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, and Multilingua. His books include Resisting Linguistic Imperialism in English Teaching (OUP, the Mina P. Shaughnessy Award 2000), Geopolitics of Academic Literacy and Knowledge Construction (University of Pittsburgh Press; 2003 Gary Olson Award by the Association of the Teachers of Advanced Composition) Critical Academic Writing and Multilingual Students (University of Michigan Press), and Reclaiming the Local in Language Policy and Practice (Lawrence Erlbaum). He is the former editor of TESOL Quarterly. John Hedgcock is Professor at Monterrey Institute of International Studies where he teaches courses such as Language Analysis, Structure of English, Second Language Acquisition, Teaching Writing, Teaching Reading, Portfolio Preparation, and the Language Teaching Practicum. His current research agenda involves composition studies, teacher education, and aspects of adult SLA. He is co-author of the first and second editions of Teaching ESL Composition (Lawrence Erbaum) and has€contributed chapters to edited volumes on writing and rhetoric. His

252 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

articles and essays have appeared in Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching Research, Applied Language Learning, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Identity, and Education, Language Learning, the Journal of Second Language Writing, Second Language Research, Foreign Language Annals, TESOL Quarterly, and TESOL Journal. Alan Hirvela is Assistant Professor at Ohio State University where he teaches a variety of MA and PhD courses that focus mainly on testing, L2 reading, and methods of teaching English as a second language. The field of L2 writing (broadly defined) remains his primary domain of research activity. His publications include Linking Literacies: Perspectives on L2 Reading-Writing Connections (with Diane Belcher, University of Michigan Press). Connecting Reading and Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction (University of Michigan Press), The Oral-Literate Connection: Perspectives on L2 Speaking, Writing, and Other Media Interactions (with Diane Belcher, University of Michigan Press), and various coedited guest-edited journal issues on second language writing (Journal of Second Language Writing, Journal of Asian Pacific Communication). Together with Diane Belcher he edits TESOL Quarterly. Fiona Hyland is Associate Professor at the Faculty of Education of the University of Hong Kong. Her research interest include second language writing, feedback and revision in ESL writing, independent language learning and self-access resources, and language testing and assessment. Her research has appeared in System, Journal of Second Language Writing, English Language Teaching Journal, Canadian Modern Language Review, Journal of Language Teaching Research, Language Teaching, Language Awareness, and Asia Pacific Journal of Language in Education. Together with Ken Hyland she has recently edited Feedback in second language writing (CUP, 2006). Ken Hyland is Chair Professor of Applied Linguistics and Director of the Centre for Applied English Studies of the University of Hong Kong. He has taught applied linguistics and EAP for almost 30 years working in countries all over the world, such as Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Malasya, Papua New Guinea, New Zealand and Hong Kong, before moving to the UK in 2003. He has published over 120 articles, which have appeared in the most prestigious journals in the field. He has published 11 books on language education and academic writing, including Second Language Writing (CUP, 2003), Genre and Second Language Writing (University of Michigan Press, 2004), Metadiscourse (Continuum, 2005), English for Academic Purposes (Routledge, 2006), and Feedback in Second Language Writing (edited with Fiona Hyland, CUP, 2006). He is Co-editor of Applied Linguistics.



Contributors’ biodata 253

Natalie Lefkowitz is Professor at the Department of Foreign Languages, Central Washington University. She specializes in Spanish, French, and Applied Linguistics. She is the author of four textbooks, From Process to Product: Beginning to Intermediate Writing Skills for Students of ESL (Pearson Education), Impressions Personnelles (SPCK Publishing), Talking Backwards, Looking Forwards: The French Language Game Verlan (Narr), and Varieties of English (University of Michigan Press). She has also published numerous articles related to language acquisition and instruction which have been published in leading journals such as the Modern Language Journal, Language Teaching Research, and the Journal of Second Language Writing. Ilona Leki is Professor of English and Director of ESL at the University of Tennessee. Her books include Understanding ESL Writers: A Guide for Teachers, Academic Writing: Exploring Processes and Strategies, and Reading in the Composition Classroom: Second Language Perspectives (with Joan Carson) and Undergraduates in a Second Language: Challenges and Complexities of Academic Literacy Development. Her research interests center around the development of academic literacy, and she is winner of the 1996 TESOL/Newbury House Distinguished Researcher Award. Her work has appeared in journals such as The Modern Language Journal, Written Communication, TESOL Quarterly, Learning and Instruction, and Annual Review of Applied Linguistics. She is former editor of the Journal of Second Language Writing. Rosa M. Manchón is Professor of Applied Linguistic at the University of Murcia, Spain. Her research interests include the socio-cognitive dimension of second language acquisition, particularly second language writing processes, and research methods. Her work has appeared in leading Applied Linguistics and Second Language Writing journals such as Learning and Instruction, Journal of Second Language Writing, The Modern Language Journal, and Language Learning. Her books include Writing in Foreign Language Contexts: Learning, Teaching and Research (Multilingual Matters, 2009), and L2 Writing Development: Multiple Perspectives (Mouton de Gruyter, 2012). Together with Christine Tardy she edits the Journal of Second Language Writing. Lourdes Ortega is Professor of Second Language Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa. Her research interests include instructed SLA, tasks and interlanguage development, L2 writing, foreign language education, and research methods. Recent books are Synthesizing Research on Language Learning and Teaching (co-edited with John Norris, John Benjamins), The Longitudinal Study of Advanced L2 Capacities (co-edited with Heidi Byrnes, Lawrence Erlbaum),

254 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

and Understanding Second Language Acquisition (Arnold). Her work has also appeared in leading journals such as Applied Linguistics, Language Learning, Annual Review of Applied Linguistics, Second Language Research, The Modern Language Journal, and Studies in Second Language Acquisition. She is the Editor of Language Learning. Julio Roca de Larios is Associate Professor at the University of Murcia, Spain, where he works in initial EFL teacher education. His research interests include the analysis of writing processes, classroom interaction processes, and the development of appropriate tools and strategies to foster reflective practice among student teachers. His work on foreign language writing has appeared in Language Learning, the Modern Language Journal, Learning and Instruction and the Journal of Second Language Writing.

Author index

A Achugar, M.╇ 135, 150 Adams, R.╇ 6, 14, 65, 67, 69–71, 74, 78 Aktas, R.╇ 24, 32 Alegría de la Colina, A.╇ 65, 67, 78 Allen, S.╇ 87, 106, 186, 202 Applebee, A. N.╇ 40, 46, 48, 58 Arnold, J.╇ 117, 229 B Baetens Beardsmore, H.╇ 57–58 Bakhtin, M. M.╇ 27, 32, 142, 150 Bazerman, C.╇ 112, 131, 239, 250 Bauckus, S.╇ 211, 229–232 Belcher, D.╇ 14, 46, 58, 78, 82 Benati, A.╇ 65, 69, 78 Benesch, S.╇ 25, 30, 32 Bereiter, C.╇ 19, 32 Berlin, J.╇ 137, 151–152, 239, 250 Bhabha, H. K.╇ 125, 129, 131 Bhatia, V. K.╇ 23, 32 Biber, D.╇ 22, 32 Bigelow, M.╇ 65, 69, 74, 79, 175, 179 Bitchener, J.╇ 65, 69, 74–75, 78, 82, 161–162, 178 Bloch, J.╇ 19, 32 Blyth, C.╇ 211, 229–231 Boquet, E. H.╇ 241, 250 Bosher, S.╇ 19, 32 Breen, M.╇ 30, 33, 179 Brice, C.╇ 18, 35, 133, 153 Brinton, D. M.╇ 41, 58, 211, 229–232 Britton, J.╇ 39, 58 Brown, A.╇ 145, 150, 211–212, 222, 229 Brown, H. D.╇ 145, 150, 211–212, 222, 229 Bruce, I.╇ 24, 33

Bruffee, K.╇ 27, 33 Bruton, A.╇ 6, 14, 161, 178 Bush, M.╇ 204 Byrnes, H.╇ xi, 5, 7, 10–12, 21, 25, 37, 42, 81, 112, 132–133, 135–137, 144, 150–153, 183, 211, 228, 240–241, 244–247 C Cadman, K.╇ 30, 33 Campbell, R. N.╇ 210, 230 Canagarajah, S.╇ xi, 5, 7, 10–12, 28, 30, 33, 111–112, 116–117, 120, 131, 239–240, 245, 248 Candlin, C.╇ 25, 33 Carr, P.╇ 21, 33 Carson, J.╇ 5–6, 10, 14, 19, 34, 133–134, 152 Carter-Thomas, S.╇ 24, 33 Casanave, C.╇ 20, 33 Chandler, J.╇ 161–162, 178–179 Chavez, M.╇ 21, 34, 227, 230 Chomsky, N.╇ 21, 33 Christensen, L.╇ 212, 214, 231 Christie, F.╇ 23, 33, 135, 147, 151 Clark, R.╇ 29, 33 Cohen, A. D.╇ 211, 230 Colombi, M. C.╇ 135, 150–151, 209, 211, 214, 230–232 Cortes, V.╇ 24, 32 Coyle, D.╇ 57–58 Creswell, J. W.╇ 212–214, 230 Cumming, A.╇ ix–x, xii, 5–6, 14, 43, 58, 61–62, 65–66, 73, 76, 78, 86, 105–106, 133, 145, 151, 182–183, 187, 192, 196, 202–204, 240, 250 Curry, M. J.╇ 239, 250 D Day, J.╇ 145, 150 DeKeyser, R.╇ 178, 197, 202

de Souza, L. M.╇ 131 Detterman, D.╇ 87, 106 Devitt, A.╇ 87, 106 Dias, P.╇ 25, 33 Dong, Y.╇ 85, 107 Dörnyei, Z.╇ 215, 230 Doughty, C.╇ 63, 78, 80–81, 160, 178 Douglas, M. O.╇ 218, 230 Draper, J. B.╇ 214, 219, 221, 223, 229–230 Drury, H.╇ 146, 151 Dudley-Evans, T.╇ 25, 33 E Edwards, C.╇ 211, 230 Ellis, R.╇ x, xii, 65, 69, 78, 82, 105, 107, 152, 160–163, 172, 178, 211, 230 Emig, J.╇ 39, 58 Eouanzoui, K.╇ 192, 204 F Fairclough, N.╇ 30, 33 Feez, S.╇ 25, 33 Ferris, D.╇ 20, 22, 27, 33, 77–78, 161, 178–179, 211, 230, 240, 250 Flower, L.╇ 18, 33, 112, 131 Flowerdew, J.╇ 99, 107, 146, 151 Fontana, A.╇ 213, 230 Fortune, A.╇ 65, 67, 71, 74, 79 Foster, D.╇ 38, 57–58, 86, 107, 242, 250 Fotos, S.╇ 172, 178 Fought, C.╇ 219, 227, 230 Francis, C.╇ 32–33, 146, 151 Freedman, A.╇ 26, 33, 105, 107 Frey, J. H.╇ 213, 230 G García Mayo, M. P.╇ 65, 67, 72, 78–79, 81

256 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

Gardner, R.╇ 215, 230 Gass, S.╇ 63, 79, 81, 203 Gentil, G.╇ 192, 204 Gimenez, J.╇ 28, 33 Goldstein, L.╇ 21, 33, 162, 178 Gómez, D.╇ 211, 230 Greene, S.╇ 34 Gutiérrez, J. R.╇ 229–230 H Haffner, C.╇ 25, 33 Hall, K.╇ 24, 33, 231 Halliday, M.╇ 81, 132–133, 135, 137, 147–148, 150–151, 153 Hammond, J.╇ 30, 33, 131 Hanaoka, O.╇ 65, 69, 71, 79 Harding, A.╇ 24, 33 Harklau, L.╇ 5–6, 14, 107, 136, 249–250 Hasan, R.╇ 24, 33, 135, 151–152 Hayes, J.╇ 18, 33–34, 112, 131 Hedgcock, J.╇ xi, 7, 12, 13, 209, 211, 230, 240, 242, 245, 247 Herrington, A. J.╇ 39, 49, 51, 58, 247 Hicks, J. H.╇ 214, 219, 221, 223, 229–230 Hidalgo, M.╇ 210, 230 Hirvela, A.╇ xi, 4–5, 7–8, 11, 14, 37, 44, 46–47, 58, 61, 78, 82, 111, 149, 219, 222, 228, 238–240, 243, 247 Honeycutt, R.╇ 18, 21, 34 Hood, S.╇ 145–146, 152 Hornberger, N. H.╇ 214, 218, 230–231 Horwitz, E.╇ 217, 231 Hsu, A.╇ 20, 35 Huberman, A. M.╇ 188, 203 Hyland, F.╇ xi, 4, 6–8, 11–12, 17, 19–21, 23–24, 26, 28–29, 33–34, 37, 107, 159, 161, 166, 171, 178–179, 183, 211, 222, 231, 238–239, 241, 243–244, 246, 248, 250 Hyland, K.╇ xi, 4, 6–8, 11–12, 17, 19–21, 23–24, 26, 28–29, 33–34, 37, 107, 159, 161, 166, 171, 178–179, 183, 211, 222, 231, 238–239, 241, 243–244, 246, 248, 250

I Ivanic, R.╇ 29, 33 Izumi, S.╇ 65, 69, 74, 79, 175, 179, 196, 203 J James, M. A.╇ 39, 87, 107 Jiménez Catalán, R.╇ 43, 57, 59 Johns, A.╇ 25, 27–28, 33–34, 87, 102–103, 107, 112, 132, 145, 152 Johnson, B.╇ 212, 214, 231 K Kachru, B. B.╇ 242, 250 Kagan, O.╇ 211, 229–232 Kasper, L. F.╇ 41, 58 Kelleher, A.╇ 209, 231 Kennedy, G.╇ 22, 34 Kent, T.╇ 20, 34 Kim, Y.╇ 67–68, 79 Knapp, P.╇ 24, 34 Knoch, U.╇ 65, 69, 75, 78, 161, 178 Krashen, S.╇ 160–161, 179 Kroll, B.╇ 20, 34, 132 Kubota, R.╇ 24, 35 Kuiken, F.╇ 65, 67–68, 72, 74, 79 L Langer, J. A.╇ 39–40, 46, 48, 58 Lantolf, J.╇ 81, 162–163, 179 Lapkin, S.╇ x, xii, 63, 65–69, 71–74, 76, 79–81, 132, 182–183, 204 Labov, W.╇ 226, 231 Leaver, B.╇ 211, 231 Lee, G.╇ 195, 203 Leeser, M. J.╇ 65, 67–68, 71, 73, 75, 79 Lefkowitz, N.╇ xi, 7, 12–13, 209–211, 221, 228–229, 231, 240, 242, 247 Leki, I.╇ ix, xi–xii, 5, 7, 9–12, 14, 21, 43, 51–55, 58, 77, 79, 85, 87, 98, 107, 113, 144, 161, 177, 179, 182, 203, 239–240, 243–246, 248–250 Leow, R.╇ 75, 79 Li, J.╇ 99, 107, 242, 250 Lillis, T. M.╇ 239, 250 Liu, E.╇ 22, 35

Long, M.╇ 53, 80, 160, 179 Lonka, K.╇ 38, 57, 59 Luk, J.╇ 188, 203 Lung, J.╇ 24, 34 Lynch, A.╇ 210, 231 Lyster, R.╇ 42, 58, 174, 179 M Macken-Horarik, M.╇ 24, 30, 33–34, 131 Mackey, A.╇ 63, 79 Makoni, S.╇ 131–132 Malmqvist, A.╇ 65, 67, 71–73, 79 Manchón, R. M.╇ xi, 3, 5–9, 11–12, 14, 19, 21, 34–35, 37, 57– 58, 61–62, 71, 75, 77, 79–80, 105–108, 133, 135, 144, 151–152, 162, 177, 179, 181–184, 191–192, 203, 237–241, 244–248, 250 Martin, J. R.╇ 23, 33, 136, 146, 151–152, 154–156, 250 Mason, L.╇ 38, 57, 59 Matthiessen, C.╇ 135, 137, 148, 151–152 Matsuda, P. K.╇ 14, 133, 152–153, 178, 241, 250 Matsumura, L.╇ 34 Mauranen, A.╇ 117, 120, 128, 132 Mercado, C. I.╇ 219, 231 McKay, S. L.╇ 212, 231 Miles, M. B.╇ 188, 203 Morgan, D.╇ 214, 231 Murphy, L.╇ x, xii, 19, 34, 77, 80, 202–203 N Nassaji, H.╇ 65, 69, 80 Nelson, G.╇ 19, 34, 59 Newell, G. F.╇ 39–40, 59 Niu, R.╇ 65, 67, 70, 80 Norris, J.╇ 75, 80, 135, 137, 144, 150, 152 Norton, B.╇ 86, 107 Nystrand, M.╇ 26, 34 O O’Brien, T.╇ 133, 152 O’Donnell, K.╇ 87, 107 Omaggio-Hadley, A.╇ 231 O’Neill, M.╇ 75, 80



Ortega, L.╇ xi, 4–7, 10, 13–14, 37, 57, 62, 75, 78, 80, 133–134, 150, 152, 190, 202–203, 237 P Pare, P.╇ 25, 33 Parodi, C.╇ 211, 226, 229, 232 Patthey-Chavez, G.╇ 21, 34 Pavlenko, A.╇ 162–163, 179 Peyton, J. K.╇ 209–210, 229, 231–232 Pfeiffer, P. C.╇ 136, 152 Polio, C.╇ 65, 69, 74–76, 80 Pritchard, R.╇ 18, 21, 34 Q Qi, D. S.╇ 65, 69, 71, 74, 80 R Ranta, L.╇ 174, 179 Ravelli, L.╇ 147, 152 Reichelt, M.╇ 14, 79, 86, 108, 133, 152–153, 179, 231 Reinders, H.╇ 65, 67–68, 75, 80 Rijlaarsdam, G.╇ 19, 35 Robinson, P.╇ 75, 78, 80, 178–179, 191, 203 Roca, A.╇ 209, 211, 214, 230–232 Roca de Larios, J.╇ x–xii, 5–7, 12, 14, 19, 21, 34, 62, 77–78, 80, 105, 107, 133, 144, 152, 181, 184, 199, 203, 240–241, 245–247, 250 Rodgers, T. S.╇ 212, 229 Romero, M.╇ 221, 228–229, 232 Rosa, E.╇ xi, 3, 7–8, 42, 61, 75, 80, 106, 181, 237 Rose, D.╇ 146, 152 Rosenthal, J. W.╇ 210, 230 Ross-Feldman, L.╇ 6, 14, 65, 67, 70–71, 78 Russell, D.╇ 38, 57–59, 86, 107, 239, 242, 250 Ruiz de Zarobe, Y.╇ 42, 57, 59 Russell, D. R.╇ 38, 57–59, 86, 107, 239, 242, 250 Ryshina-Pankova, M.╇ 135, 153 S Sachs, R.╇ 65, 69, 74–76, 80

Author index 257

Sasaki, M.╇ 19, 35, 86, 108, 192– 193, 203, 246 Saussure, F.╇ 21, 34 Savignon, S.╇ 210, 232 Scalera, D.╇ 226–227, 229, 232 Scallet, D. L.╇ 195, 203 Scardamalia, M.╇ 19, 32 Schwartz, A. M.╇ 211, 232 Schleppegrell, M.╇ 135, 153 Schmidt, R.╇ 63, 75, 80, 160, 179, 197, 203, 230 Schoonen, R.╇ 19, 35 Shaw, P.╇ 22, 35 Sheen, Y.╇ 65, 69, 74–75, 80, 178, 197, 203 Shi, L.╇ 24, 35 Silva, T.╇ ix, xii, 5, 14, 18, 35, 43, 58, 133, 152–153, 178, 182, 203, 227, 232 Silva-Corvalán, C.╇ 227, 232 Silverman, D.╇ 214, 232 Sivatamby, K.╇ 111, 115–121, 123–130, 132 Smagorinsky, P.╇ 18, 35 Smit, D.╇ 87, 108 Smoke, T.╇ 43, 45–46, 49, 55, 59 Snellings, P.╇ 19, 35 Snow, M. A.╇ 41, 58 Spack, R.╇ 43–46, 51, 55, 59, 87, 108 St John, M.-J.╇ 25, 33 Sternglass, M. S.╇ 48–51, 55, 59 Stevenson, M.╇ 19, 35 Storch, N.╇ 12, 14, 27, 35, 65–67, 69, 71–75, 80–82, 183, 201–203 Street, B.╇ 23, 35, 86, 108 Sylvan, C. E.╇ 228–229, 232 Suzuki, W.╇ 65, 67, 69, 81, 132 Swain, M.╇ x, xii, 63, 65–69, 71–73, 76, 79–82, 113, 132, 182–183, 203–204 Swales, J.╇ 23, 25, 27, 29, 35, 112, 115–117, 119, 132, 176, 179

Tottie, G.╇ 22, 35 Truscott, J.╇ 20, 35, 161, 176, 178–179 Tsui, A.╇ 242, 250 Tynjala, P.╇ 38, 57, 59

T Tardy, C.╇ 103, 107, 240, 250 Tavakoli, P.╇ 191, 204 Tocalli-Beller, A.╇ 65, 69, 82 Tollefson, J.╇ 242, 250 Tomlin, R. S.╇ 75, 82

Z Zamel, V.╇ 18, 35, 112, 132 Zentella, A. C.╇ 221, 227, 233 Zhou, A.╇ 192, 204

V Valdés, G.╇ 209–211, 213, 218–219, 221, 224, 232 Valdes, R.╇ 21, 34 van den Bergh, H.╇ 19, 35 van Gelderen, A.╇ 19, 35 Vanderheyden, K.╇ 86, 107 Vedder, I.╇ 65, 67–68, 72, 74, 79 Villa, D.╇ 75, 82, 221, 233 Villa, V.╇ 75, 82, 221, 233 W Watanabe, Y.╇ 65, 67, 69, 73, 81–82, 152 Weigle, S.╇ 55, 59 Weissberg, R.╇ 6, 14, 46, 59, 77, 82 Weisskirch, R. S.╇ 219, 233 Wells, G.╇ 28, 35 Wesche, M. B.╇ 41, 58 White, A.╇ 22, 35, 229 Widdowson, H.╇ 43, 59, 81, 204 Wiemelt, J.╇ 26, 34 Wigglesworth, G.╇ 12, 14, 65, 67, 69, 71–73, 81–82, 183, 201, 203 Williams, J.╇ 6, 14, 33, 62–63, 75, 78–79, 81–82, 178, 202, 211, 233, 241, 250 Willis, J.╇ 211–212, 230–231, 233 Winsor, D.╇ 239, 250 Y You, X.╇ 86, 94, 99, 103, 108, 167, 170, 205 Young, D.╇ 217, 231, 233 X Xu, C.╇ 77, 82

Thematic index

A Accuracy╇ 161–162, 167–169, 176, 189–190, 240–241 gramatical╇ 22, 211 formal╇ 32, 141, 222 Agency╇ 9–12, 86, 104, 111, 125, 128–129, 194, 196–197, 200– 201, 248–249 Anxiety╇ 216–217 Appropriation╇ 131, 145 Assessment╇ 20, 25, 137–139, 142 of linguistic options╇ 70 of alternatives╇ 182 options╇ 20 portfolio╇ 20 Attention╇ 20, 40, 61–64, 66–73, 75–76, 160, 175–176, 184, 197 Attitude(s)╇ 42, 72, 146, 159–160, 168, 175, 201, 210–215, 228, 241 Audience╇ 20–21, 24, 26–27, 32, 95, 97–100, 103–104, 111, 114–115, 120–122, 125, 127, 129, 189, 193, 239–240, 247–248 Authenticity╇ 13, 237, 245–249 Awareness see also genre awareness as detection/understanding╇ 75 Critical Language Awareness╇ 29 meta-awareness╇ 148 metacognitive╇ 19 melatinguistic╇ 169 process of╇ 75–76, 197 reflexive╇ 111 B Beliefs╇ 11–13, 29–30, 51, 71–72, 159, 163, 165–167, 183–184, 187, 201, 210–215, 221–224, 226, 231–232, 241, 247, 249 Biliteracy╇ 213, 220

Biliterate abilities╇ 220 identity construction╇ 210 knowledge╇ 208, 210 development╇ 210 rertoires╇ 219 Brokering╇ 219 C CARS model╇ 115, 117–118, 120, 123, 128 Content-Based Instruction (CBI, CBLT)╇ 4, 8, 39–43, 46 Citation╇ 25, 100–104, 112 Civic ethos╇ 117–118, 121, 123, 125, 127, 129 Competence see also discourse competence communicative bilingual╇ 210 multilingual writing╇ 126 Composing╇ 31, 73, 135, 137, 141, 144–146, 182, 193, 240 abilities╇ 6 competencies╇ 238 process╇ 71, 114, 190 voice╇ 145 Composition╇ 12, 22, 137, 181–183, 192, 201, 226, 238–241 courses╇ 45, 211, 223, 241 studies╇ 14, 34, 108, 238–239 teachers╇ 127 writing tasks╇ 11, 61, 64, 66–69, 71, 73, 76, 181–183 Collaborative writing╇ 9, 62, 64, 66–67, 70–73, 76, 183 Consciousness raising╇ 11, 25, 68, 159–161, 176 Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL)╇ 4, 39–43, 42, 51, 57 Content-based Instruction╇ 4, 8, 39–42

Context see also learning-to-write contexts of culture╇ 29–30 of situation╇ 30 of use╇ 4, 9, 10, 26, 148 rhetorical╇ 10, 97–98, 115, 127–128 Contrastive Rhetoric╇ 86–87, 127 Correction╇ 20, 160, 161, 162, 164–165, 168–169, 172, 176, 222 see also error correction Creativity╇ 26–27, 128 D Demotivation╇ 244 Depth of processing╇ 74, 177, 184, 240 Detection╇ 74–76 Developmental trajectory╇ 134– 135 Dialect dissing╇ 221 Dialogism╇ 23 Dictogloss tasks╇ 64, 68–69 Discourse╇ 30, 70, 105, 113–118, 120, 122, 125, 127, 129–131, 134, 136, 138, 140, 147, 211, 215, 238–240 see also text as discourse, shuttling between languages and discourses communities╇ 27–28, 32, 47, 102, 215, 240, 246 competencies╇ 28 marketing╇ 117 Double vision╇ 125, 128 Drafting╇ 18–19, 73 E Editing╇ 18–20, 68–69, 73, 183, 222

260 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

Emic perspective╇ 18, 248 English as a second language (ESL)╇ 38, 41, 45–47, 57, 112, 133–135, 164, 210, 243–244 for Academic Purposes (EAP)╇ 3, 22, 112, 181, 185–190, 239, 244, 252 for Specific Purposes╇ 3, 151, 239 English-medium higher education╇ 241–242, 244 Error╇ 77, 130, 140, 161–165, 168–174 correction╇ 20, 22, 35, 69, 77, 161, 165 rate╇ 162, 197 Essay╇ 22, 24, 27–30, 50, 64, 68, 90–92, 94–99, 102–106, 120, 125, 140, 165, 171–172, 190, 222, 240, 246, 248 Expressivist views of composition╇ 31, 239 F Feedback╇ 9, 11–12, 18–20, 26, 62–64, 68–70, 72, 74–75, 77, 97, 126, 135, 138, 159–178, 183, 186–187, 192, 194–197, 222, 224–225, 240–241, 243–244 corrective╇ 14, 63, 70, 74–75, 77–78, 80–81, 162, 170, 175, 178–179, 186, 197, 203, 222, 250 focused/unfocused╇ 69 for accuracy╇ 9, 77, 162, 177, 240 for acquisition╇ 9, 11, 77, 162, 177, 240, 248 form-focused╇ 11, 159–163, 166–178 internal╇ 105 options╇ 165 processing of╇ 72, 74, 77, 194–197, 200–201 studies╇ 64, 68 teacher╇ 26, 241, 243, 248 Fluency╇ 52, 88, 99, 101, 161, 186, 193, 197–198, 211, 216, 219

Focus on Form╇ 63–64, 67–68, 70–71, 75, 161, 166 see also Form-focused feedback, Form-focused instruction Foreign language╇ 38, 42, 57, 133–134, 209, 242–248 contexts╇ 38, 57, 183, 242, 246 writing programs╇ 42, 136–137 Form-focused instruction╇ 12, 181, 194, 199–200 G Gap filling╇ 22, 76, 184 Generating content/ideas╇ 19, 61, 222 linguistic options╇ 70, 182 new linguistic knowledge╇ 73 text╇ 19, 61, 222 Genre╇ 23–32, 42, 85–88, 111–114, 116, 120, 127–128, 130–131, 136–138, 141–142, 144, 167, 219, 222, 238–240, 241, 243–248 see also genre-based tasks academic╇ 90, 222, 240 antecedent╇ 87, 104–105 approaches╇ 4, 23–26 awareness╇ 21, 211 conventions╇ 10, 25, 113–114, 129 curriculum╇ 137–138, 211 demands╇ 87, 102 experiences╇ 102 instruction╇ 25–26, 30, 87, 102–102 knowledge╇ 8, 31, 86–88, 90, 93–94, 96, 98–99, 101–102, 104, 209, 248, 250 textual╇ 113, 116 Goal(s) language learning╇ 12, 159, 194, 200 learning╇ 149, 177, 192, 214 setting╇ 20 writing╇ 12–13, 19, 23, 25, 27, 42, 49, 86, 94, 105 , 149, 159, 177, 181, 184–185, 187–188, 192–193, 199–202, 210–211, 222–223, 241, 245, 247–248

Grammar╇ 67–70, 95, 103, 142, 148, 175, 186, 193, 195–196, 216, 222–223, 225–226, 228, 240, 243–244 attention to (while writing/ while providing or receiving feedback)╇ 63– 67, 70, 72–73, 161, 166–169, 172–173, 175 proofing╇ 21 Grammatical metaphor╇ 133, 137, 141, 146 H Hedging╇ 22, 24–25 Heritage language╇ 12, 209–232 language education╇ 209, 229–232 language learning╇ 7 language students╇ 209, 227, 229, 243, 245, 247 speakers╇ 211, 226 Humility ethos╇ 120–121, 127, 129 Hybridity╇ 124, 128, 131 Hybrid texts/discourses╇ 125– 126, 131 Hypothesis see also Input Hypothesis, Noticing Hypothesis, Output Hypothesis formulation╇ 70 testing╇ 64, 66, 70, 160–161, 195 I Identity╇ 10, 17, 23, 50–51, 113–114, 116–117, 120–121, 127, 129–130, 210, 222, 243–244, 247–249 construction╇ 210 multiple (identities)╇ 129 negotiation╇ 248 writer╇ 247 Imagined communities  (L2-related)╇ 86, 192 In-betweenness╇ 125 Individual differences╇ 12, 72, 75, 159, 176, 200–201 Individual writing╇ 64, 73, 77



Input╇ 41, 45, 64–65, 68–69, 74–76, 81, 163, 172, 184 comprehensible╇ 41 enhancement╇ 64, 69, 79 Hypothesis╇ 64 learning conditions╇ 69, 75, 196 processing╇ 64, 69, 75, 81, 175 input/output studies╇ 64–65, 68–69 International students╇ 85, 88–89, 245 Intertextuality╇ 23, 27 J Jaffna Tamil society╇ 115, 122, 129 K Knowledge╇ 145, 147–148 see also genre knowledge, L2€knowledge automatization╇ 197 content╇ 3, 7, 29, 31, 38–43, 50–51 context╇ 8, 31 declarative╇ 86, 94, 101–102, 105 disciplinary╇ 9–10, 54, 50–51 discourse╇ 211 explicit╇ 70, 160–161 implicit╇ 70, 160–161 literacy╇ 86–87, 99, 102 metacognitive╇ 192–193 metalinguistic╇ 199, 222 procedural╇ 21, 86, 94 process╇ 31 representation/construction╇ 111, 113–114, 117, 130–131, 145, 148 system╇ 31 telling/transforming╇ 19 transfer of╇ 9, 85, 104–105 L L2 knowledge (acquisition/ consolidation/expansion)╇ 61, 63, 68–70, 73, 177, 182, 195–197, 201 Language-based tasks╇ 64, 68, 71 Language learning potential of collective reformulations╇ 199

Thematic index 261

of feedback╇ 11, 159–161, 163, 166, 172 of reading╇ 6 of writing╇ 6, 8, 12, 61–62, 105, 179, 181–185, 188, 191, 193–194, 200, 241, 245–247, 249 of written output practice╇ 77 Language related episodes (LREs)╇ 63–64, 68, 70–72, 74–75, 79 Language re-use╇ 125, 145 Language socialization╇ 209, 211, 220 Languaging╇ 63–64, 66, 69–70, 72, 113, 131, 133, 136, 147, 240 Learning processes╇ 12, 70, 75–76, 185, 189, 194, 201 see also focus on form, noticing, practice Learning to write (LW)╇ 3–13, 17–18, 20–22, 24–26, 29, 31, 48, 54, 57, 64, 85–86, 88, 99, 103, 105–106, 111, 114–115, 129–130, 133, 135, 143–144, 147, 150, 159, 177, 181, 183, 192–193, 195, 201, 209–212, 220, 228–229, 237–238, 245, 249 approaches╇ 211 contexts╇ 99, 159 needs╇ 211 principles╇ 229 Lexical retrieval╇ 194 Linguistic processing╇ 62, 66–68, 70–71, 75, 182, 196 Literacy╇ 8–11, 13, 23, 28–30, 44–45, 47, 51, 82, 86–88, 90–91, 97–99, 102, 104, 136, 147, 181, 183, 190, 209– 215, 218–220, 223–224, 228, 239, 243, 245–246 academic╇ 14, 44–45, 51, 58–59, 82, 86–88, 107–108, 210, 219–220, 223–224, 246, 250 computer-based╇ 8, 47, 57 demands╇ 47, 87, 104, 239 development╇ 9, 11, 51, 58, 82, 87, 136, 147, 209–211, 213, 219

development patterns╇ 211 development processes╇ 209 electronically-oriented╇ 47 education╇ 23, 147, 243 knowledge╇ 86–87, 99, 102 needs╇ 13, 209, 219, 224, 229 practices╇ 17, 30, 219 tasks╇ 90–91, 99, 104 Literature review╇ 118, 125, 145 M Manipralava╇ 126 Meaning making╇ 11, 76, 133, 135, 137, 142–148, 182–183, 246 resources╇ 246 textual╇ 135, 146–147 writing tasks╇ 11, 76, 182–183 Mental model (of writing)╇ 12, 184, 189, 192, 199 Metatalk╇ 63, 66 Misalignments╇ 13, 209, 229, 237, 242–243, 249 Modelling╇ 25, 29, 32, 64, 97, 136–137 Models╇ 64, 69, 97, 112, 114, 136, 138, 211–212, 228 see also CARS model, mental model of writing╇ 18–19, 112, 114 of genre╇ 25 Motivation╇ 11–13, 41, 71–72, 159, 161, 176–177, 201, 214–215, 247 Multicompetence╇ 5 Multilingual authors/writers╇ 9–10, 87–88, 93–94, 105, 113–115, 125, 127–129, 238, 242, 244, 248 communities╇ 131 students╇ 10, 85–87, 93, 102, 111, 113–114, 130–131 texts╇ 114 Multilingualism╇ 42, 51, 128 Multivoicedness╇ 133, 146 N New Rhetoric╇ 25 Noticing╇ 11–12, 62–64, 66–68, 70, 72, 74–76, 78–80, 159–162, 174, 178–179, 181–185, 194–197, 200, 240 activity╇ 66–67, 74, 182, 195–196, 240

262 Learning-to-Write and Writing-to-Learn in an Additional Language

elaborate╇ 74 function (of output/writing)╇ 66, 68, 185, 195 Hypothesis╇ 63–64, 79 perfunctory╇ 74 processes╇ 12, 67, 74, 181–182, 195, 197, 200 substantive╇ 74 the gap╇ 12, 63, 107, 160, 195 the hole╇ 195 vs. understanding╇ 197 O Output╇ 9–10, 61–64, 68–70, 74–77, 163, 181–183, 185, 195–196, 201, 211, 240 see also input/output studies, language learning potential challenging╇ 68, 181, 185, 195, 201 Hypothesis╇ 63, 68, 76, 183, 185, 195 learning conditions╇ 69, 74, 196 metalinguistic function of╇ 195 noticing function of╇ 185 practice╇ 9, 61, 64, 68–70, 77, 181 pushed╇ 54, 183, 195, 211, 240 Planning╇ 18–19, 31, 190, 230 Portfolio╇ 186 assessment╇ 20 mixed-genre╇ 25 Postmodern theories/views╇ 112, 239 Postcolonial writing╇ 126 scholars╇ 248 Practice (process of)╇ 8–9, 11–12, 61, 64, 68–70, 100–101, 126, 149, 159, 173, 194, 197–198 see also output practice, vocabulary practice book Problem solving╇ 12, 18, 63, 66, 73, 105, 113, 182, 184–185, 187, 190, 196, 200, 201 behaviour╇ 12, 182, 184, 187, 200

nature of writing╇ 12, 18, 66, 73, 105 tasks╇ 63, 182 Process-oriented approaches/ studies╇ 4, 64, 66, 239 R Reader-oriented approaches/ views╇ 26, 28–29 Reading see also language learning potential and academic literacy╇ 44 electronic-mediated╇ 46–47 process of╇ 26 reading-speaking-writing connections╇ 149 Reflection on language (while writing)╇ 63, 70, 74, 162, 178, 181, 196 Reformulation╇ 20, 64, 69, 74, 165, 199, 240 Register╇ 141, 148, 227 Resistance╇ 125, 131, 247–248 Revision╇ 18, 31, 39, 45, 138, 161–164, 170–171, 175, 177, 190, 195–196, 241, 248 see also strategies Rewriting╇ 18, 161, 190 Rhetorical negotiation╇ 130, 248 S Scaffolding╇ 25, 104 Self-esteem, linguistic╇ 220, 226 Shuttling between languages and discourses╇ 10, 111, 113–115, 126, 129–131 pedagogy of╇ 130–131 Social context╇ 5, 14, 115, 147, 152 Socioliterate approaches to teaching╇ 28, 211 Socialization language╇ 209, 211, 220 bilingual and bicultural╇ 215 Strategies see also language reuse feedback╇ 72, 159, 171, 172–177 learning╇ 39, 105, 177 memorizing╇ 105 reading╇ 138

revision╇ 164, 177 teaching╇ 21, 25, 222, 224 writing╇ 18–19, 30–31, 49, 50, 54, 56, 105, 111–112, 114, 125–126, 128, 130, 140, 145, 175, 187–188, 190 Study abroad╇ 86, 136, 140, 192–193, 246 Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL)╇ 11, 133, 135–136, 145–148 T Task(s) see also dictogloss tasks, meaning making tasks cognitively-demanding, complex╇ 67, 76, 183–185 collaborative╇ 27, 63, 66, 70 complexity╇ 67, 191, 201 conceptualization╇ 12, 191, 199, 203 consciousness raising╇ 160 difficulty╇ 203 genre-based╇ 136 insider dimension of╇ 191 language-based/meaningbased╇ 64, 68, 71 modality effects╇ 67 observation╇ 19 problem-based╇ 20 summary writing╇ 11, 133, 136–146 text-reconstruction╇ 183 Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT)╇ 4, 191, 203 Text(s) see also generating as discourse╇ 8, 18 as objects╇ 8, 18, 21–22 generation╇ 74, 76 multi-voiced╇ 139 multilingual╇ 114 text-focused theories╇ 21, 23–26 Textography╇ 116, 132 Think aloud╇ 64, 66, 164–165, 182 protocols╇ 66, 164–165 Time task╇ 71 on task╇ 7, 75



Transfer╇ 9, 49, 51, 54–55, 85, 87, 94, 96, 104 far╇ 87, 104 of genre knowledge╇ 9, 85, 104 of strategies╇ 49 Translation╇ 118, 134, 140, 155 U Understanding see awareness, noticing Uptake╇ 75, 86 V Visible pedagogy╇ 24 Vocabulary expansion╇ 146 learning (through writing)╇ 193–194 practice book╇ 173, 177

Thematic index 263

Voice╇ 100, 111, 114, 125, 129, 131, 142–143, 145–146, 238–239 W Writerly selves╇ 13, 54, 237, 247–249 Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC)╇ 3–4, 8, 40–41, 43, 46–47, 239, 241 Writing to learn╇ 3–12, 88, 104– 105, 133, 135, 137, 177, 183, 192, 200–202, 209–212, 224, 226, 228–229, 245 content (WLC)╇ 3–8, 10–11, 13, 38–40, 43–51, 54–57, 237–246, 248–249 language (WLL)╇ 3–13, 57, 62, 150, 159, 177, 183, 192–202, 237–238, 240–247, 249

Writing centers╇ 85, 241 Writing development╇ 19, 22, 62, 135–136, 147, 149, 209–210, 243 Writing experience(s) repertoire of╇ 106 past╇ 9, 86–87, 91, 94, 98–99, 109, 187 Writing instruction╇ 24, 85–87, 99, 102–103, 146, 149, 194, 210–211, 222, 224, 228, 237– 238, 246–247, 249 Writing processes╇ 18–21, 26, 67, 72–73, 75, 112, 182, 211, 238