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Writing in the Secondary Foreign Language Classroom: The Effects of Prompts and Tasks on Novice Learners of French
Author(s) -
Way Denise Paige,
Joiner Elizabeth G.,
Seaman Michael A.
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/0026-7902.00060
Subject(s) - fluency , vocabulary , task (project management) , psychology , foreign language , mathematics education , curriculum , quality (philosophy) , narrative , linguistics , computer science , pedagogy , philosophy , management , epistemology , economics
This study investigated the effects of 3 different writing tasks (descriptive, narrative, and expository) and 3 different writing prompts (bare, vocabulary, and prose model) on 937 writing samples culled from 330 novice learners enrolled in 15 classes of Levels 1 and 2 high school French. In order to assess the quality, fluency, syntactic complexity, and accuracy of the writing samples, the researchers employed 4 evaluation methods: holistic scoring, length of product, mean length of T‐units, and percentage of correct T‐units. Results indicate that the descriptive task was the easiest and the expository task the most difficult. The prose model prompts produced the highest mean scores, and the bare prompts produced the lowest mean scores. Based on these findings, the researchers question whether the description of a novice writer in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines (1986) should be used as a blueprint for curriculum development and textbook construction for secondary novice foreign language learners.