Journal of Second Language Writing最新文献

This paper explores task evolution in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing materials, taking, as an illustrative case, written commentaries on non-verbal material such as that found in tables or graphs. The choice of this family of tasks is motivated by the fact that they have regularly occurred in EAP and English for Science and Technology (EST) textbooks from their outset in the 1970s and continue to be incorporated up to the present, as in Caplan & Johns (2022). We trace, with illustrative tasks and written responses, the evolution from Information Transfer (Widdowson, 1979) to Data Commentary, and on to Critical Commentary. We argue that this microcosm of EAP writing materials has, in fact, important parallels with other, more demanding, part genres such as reviews of the literature (from paraphrasing, to consolidating, and on to critical appraisal). We recognize that, in comparison to Second Language Acquisition (SLA) and Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT), the concept of “task” in EAP has been seriously undertheorized, and in the opening and closing sections, we attempt to rectify this.

This multiple case-study explores how a multilingual poetry task can be used to support multilingual writers in mainstream U.S. high school English language arts (ELA) classes. The purpose of the investigation is to closely examine the affordances of a multilingual poetry task and discuss its innovative pedagogical aspects in terms of the results that the task achieves—the learning it promotes—as well as highlight interdisciplinary collaboration between (English as a second language (ESL) and ELA teachers. I argue that the multilingual poetry task can innovate L2 writing pedagogy, address common problems that multilingual writers and their teachers face, and provide resident immigrant learners with affordances such as innovative developments in multilingual writing techniques, an understanding of compositional aspects of writing via open poetic forms, and an opportunity to explore humanistic aspects of language learning. A qualitative evidence-based approach is applied to analyze samples of multilingual poetry from two resident immigrant writers of diverse backgrounds (e.g., Belarus and Myanmar). This analysis is offset with learner immediate post-course and delayed interviews, learner reflective writing, and classroom observations and interactions. Finally, utilizing data from post-course ELA teacher interviews, the article discusses how interdisciplinary ELA-ESL teacher collaboration can better support emergent multilingual writers and move the field of second language writing forward.

This article responds to calls to better understand the digital literacy practices of second and foreign-language writers. Researchers followed two Arab undergraduates as they completed a research writing task in a first-year writing course, tracing how these students used common digital resources, particularly digital 1) research tools, 2) writing tools and 3) course materials. Via screen-capture and regular interview sessions the participants’ research and writing activity was observed over a period of five weeks. To understand the resulting data, Vygotskian notions of mediation were combined with writing as extended mind, a recently introduced theoretical program that emphasizes the distributed nature of cognition. Study participants were found to deploy a wide range of digital resources, often in complex and creative ways. We identify two distinct mediation profiles that we argue mark two distinct approaches to research writing: a relatively brain-bound approach, which uses external resources primarily to structure internal cognitive function, and a more extended approach, which offloads a higher degree of cognitive function to the writer’s environment. These findings offer unique insight into the digital literacy practices of an understudied student population. They also raise important questions about how best to teach writing in a digital age.

This study examines L1 and L2 English-speaking undergraduates’ engagement with an occluded, promotional genre – the personal statement (PS). Using a case study design, the researchers explored the experiences of three novice writers with no prior exposure to PSs, as the students applied to a university-sponsored grants competition that required them to produce the genre. Drawing upon metacognition theory, the researchers investigated (1) students’ metacognitive genre awareness of the PS prior to composing, along with (2) the challenges that students faced when attempting to compose the genre for the first time. Special attention is paid to comparing the similarities/differences among the L1 and L2 writers. Data for the study included semi-structured interviews, multimodal visualizations, and stimulated recalls. The findings show shared areas of metacognitive genre awareness among the case study participants, in addition to multiple differences between L1 and L2 writers. Despite such differences, all students struggled with aspects of procedural knowledge when composing the occluded genre, encountering similar challenges. Implications are discussed for writing researchers and practitioners, including the potential of multimodal visualizations as a tool for tapping into learners’ metacognition and genre awareness.

The current study extends extant research on lexical collocation and L2 English proficiency by analyzing how L2 argumentative writings assessed at different proficiency levels differ in their compositions of weakly and strongly associated collocations. Using a Natural Language Processing pipeline, a total of 640 essays from the ICNALE corpus (Ishikawa, 2018) were analyzed for word pairs that are syntactically related (e.g., Verb-Direct object), and the relationships between the relative proportions of collocations with varying strengths of association (SOA) and vocabulary proficiency scores were examined. A series of regression analyses revealed that collocations from various MI score bins showed distinct patterns of use across proficiency levels, indicating, for example, increases in the use of strongly associated collocations and decreases in the use of repelled collocations. The finding also indicated that band-based MI measures demonstrated better predictive validity than mean MI scores in modeling the vocabulary proficiency score.