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Early L2 Writing Development: A Study of Autobiographical Essays by University‐Level Students of Russian
Author(s) -
HENRY KATHRYN
Publication year - 1996
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/j.1540-4781.1996.tb01613.x
Subject(s) - fluency , linguistics , foreign language , psychology , focus (optics) , english as a foreign language , language proficiency , language assessment , empirical research , mathematics education , philosophy , physics , optics , epistemology
The article reports the results of a cross‐sectional study of 67 short autobiographical essays by U.S. students of Russian at 4 levels of study. The Novice and Intermediate level descriptions in the ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines for Writing characterize the writing under study, but the Guidelines still require further empirical testing. Linguistic measures that differentiated the groups included fluency and syntactic fluency, but not accuracy, calling into question the tendency of foreign language writing research and pedagogy to focus on grammatical accuracy. Finally, the article calls for further research into second and foreign language (L2) writing that accounts for different languages (truly foreign as well as cognate; non‐English as well as English), different developmental levels (beginning as well as advanced), and different learning situations (foreign language learning as well as second language learning).