Chances and Limitations
2. Research into foreign language writing
Research into foreign language writing has identified some of the reasons why learners often feel overwhelmed when prompted to produce written texts. First and foremost, this has to do with the enormous complexity of the writing process itself. Even in L1 writing is a very complex cognitive activity as the analysis of
‘think-aloud’ protocols during the composition process has shown (Flower/Hayes 1981: 367ff). Among other things it involves decisions about the overall intended message to be conveyed by the text, thinking about possible readers and their
needs, deciding on the general organization of the text as well as on paragraphing and possible sub-headings, choosing a title, reflecting on the form of the language (finding appropriate expressions, checking spelling and syntax), constantly review- ing passages already written, deleting, adding to, modifying or reorganizing the text, providing examples to illustrate points, adding stimuli that might catch the reader’s interest, referring to the ideas of others, proofreading, and many other such sub-processes (cf. Brookes/Grundy 1998: 7f). What is more, these processes do not occur in a linear order when mature writers produce written texts, but in a quite chaotic sequence that cannot be predicted.
Flower and Hayes (1981: 369ff) have summarized the cognitive processes that experienced writers employ in their model of the writing process, in which they distinguish processes of planning (goal setting, organizing and generating), trans- lating (turning ideas into visible language), reviewing (evaluating and revising) and monitoring (deciding what to do next). These composition processes are further complicated by the need to consider the task environment (the topic, the intended audience, the writer’s own goals and the part of the texts already produced) and to retrieve factual, strategic and linguistic information from long-term memory.
According to Scardamalia and Bereiter (1986: 783–91), expert writers are able to handle these processes because they use problem-solving and goal-oriented recursive strategies. They …
• create an organizing structure for a composition, for which they use their well- developed knowledge of discourse schemata.
• generate far more content than they will use in their compositions because they can search their memory effectively for the availability of information (metamemorial search) and retrieve it from it (heuristic search).
• can deal with ‘higher-level tasks’ and easily switch between ‘higher’ and ‘lower- level tasks’ (ibid.: 787) because spelling and punctuation are largely automatized procedures to them.
• plan purposefully by breaking up the overall goals into sub-goals and react flexibly to problems by revising their goals during the composition process.
• continually reprocess the text already produced, so that there is constant ‘in- ternal’ (to further develop contents) and ‘external’ revision (to gear it towards the intended audience) (ibid.: 790).
In contrast, inexperienced writers lack all these skills. They do not know the necessary discourse schemata, cannot search their memory efficiently when generating content, struggle with the mechanics of writing, do not develop global plans, but draft their texts right from the start Scardamalia and Bereiter (ibid.: 789) call this ‘rehearsal’’– and proof-read their texts, but do not reprocess
them more deeply. To compensate for these deficits learners need procedural support (cf. below).
These general tendencies from L1-related writing research have also been iden- tified in L2, where most research suggests that the composing processes in L1 and L2 are quite similar. Unskilled writers in L2 face more or less the same problems as unskilled writers in L1, while expert writers go about composition tasks in very similar ways, no matter whether they write in the medium of L1 or L2 (Rowe Krapels 1990: 49). What distinguishes text production in a foreign language from writing in the mother tongue are limitations of the learners’ linguistic and socio- cultural knowledge. Krings (1989: 427) regards these as the main reason for his observation that second language learners do not ‘plan’ their L2 texts in the same way as their L1 texts. Similary, Wolff (1992: 120) stresses second language learn- ers’ unfamiliarity with the writing conventions in the target culture, so that they find it difficult to apply the writing-related strategic competence they developed in their L1. Even if they have extensive procedural writing skills in L1, this is not sufficient for them to become good L2 writers because they lack the necessary declarative knowledge in L2 (Wolff 2000: 109).
Despite these differences, the model by Flower and Hayes is believed to form a useful basis for research into second language writing as well, and there indeed seems to be ‘a core of similarities between L1 and L2 writing’ (Brookes/Grundy 1998: 8).
Yet, it had to be adapted to account for the additional observations. As L2-related writing research has shown, second language learners often resort to their mother tongue during their planning, for instance, which requires a transition of the plans into L2. Therefore, activating and applying their knowledge of L2 are viewed as additional sub-processes in second language writing (Börner 1992: 299). Similarly, reduction or even avoidance strategies play a role in L2 if the linguistic means do not allow for the adequate realization of the plans in the medium of the target lan- guage. To account for these additional difficulties that second language writers face, Börner (1989: 355 and 1992: 301), Krings (1992: 70) and Zimmermann (2000: 85f) have extended the model, so that it includes planning and generating processes in L1, formulating and translating procedures, L2-related linguistic problems and strategies for dealing with them.
It needs to be stressed that the perspective chosen in this paper is based pri- marily on the process approach to writing, which is just one way of modelling and teaching writing. It has been criticized on grounds of its being focussed largely on cognitive processes, while ignoring the interactive, sociocultural and textual dimensions of writing (Gordon 2008: 244ff; Oxford 2010: 249f). Moreover, some of the practical proposals for the teaching of writing that were derived from this were
denounced because they were misguided like the assumption that when learners know and understand what expert writers do, they will be able to use recursive processes on their own (Roen 1989: 199). Hyland, for example, maintains that
‘learning to become an expert writer does not involve mimicking a set of heuristics’
(2002: 61). The model in its original form does not, however, claim that it can reveal how expert writers’ skills have evolved. Trying to teach the underlying skills in any more or less direct way would indeed be doomed to failure (cf. the discussion in section 3). Despite its weaknesses, the writing-as-process approach has its merits in that it provided important insights exploited in the practice of ELT. Among other things it encouraged
self-discovery and authorial ‘voice’; meaningful writing on topics of importance […] to the writer; invention and pre-writing tasks, and multiple drafting […]; a variety of feed- back options from real audiences; […] the idea that writing is multiply recursive rather than linear […]; and students’ awareness of the writing process (Grabe/Kaplan 1996: 87),
so that it forms the basis of many methods used in the teaching of writing. The view taken here is that for the teaching of foreign language other perspectives on writing like the ‘genre’ and the ‘functional approach’ (cf. Gordon 2008: 244ff;
Oxford 2010: 249f) can be seen as an enrichment of process writing rather than a replacement, or, as Gordon puts it, they can be used “in conjunction with the process approach” (2008: 245).