An exploratory study of primary school children's writing processes in digital environmentsthe use of models as written corrective feedback

Abstract

L2 writing has been recently one of the major areas of interest (Leki et al., 2008; Manchón & Matsuda, 2016), with much of the research focusing on the written product, the language learning affordances of written corrective feedback (WCF) (Bitchener & Storch, 2016), or L2 writing processes from an SLA perspective (Gánem-Gutiérrez & Gilmore, 2018). Research on WCF has been concerned with whether the provision or not of different types of feedback may affect the quality of the L2 text, as well as providing empirical evidence to the disciplinary debates on the effects of the provision and processing of WCF (Truscott, 1999; Ferris, 2004). Few studies have explored the role of models as WCF and how the resulting noticing of linguistic features may affect writing processes. Novel methodological procedures using keystroke-logging tools (Lindgren & Sullivan, 2019) have expanded ways to observe the writing process and pausological behavior unobtrusively. Our study intends to add new empirical evidence to: (1) the temporal distribution of writing processes in an underrepresented population (young learners), in both studies with writing processes, and in digital environments, and (2) the implementation of model texts as WCF in an attempt to observe how the management of writing processes vary in terms of lexical choices and the generation of ideas. We attempted to shed light on the extent to which the provision of model texts as WCF affect the management of young learners' writing processes and children's pausological behavior. We designed a study with 18 Primary school children (aged 10-11), through a three-stage feedback classroom-based experimental research with an experimental (n= 10) and a control (n= 8) group. Using Inputlog 8.0. (Leijten & Van Waes, 2013), children wrote their initial texts on the computer. The experimental group was subsequently provided with a model text, and the control group self-edited their texts without feedback. In the third stage, children were asked to rewrite their initial texts. In the analysis, we operationalized the writing process in terms of planning, formulation and revision. To analyze the pausological behavior, we used a wide range of measures as in previous research including time on task, pausing time, pause frequency, pause duration, pause distribution, and pause location. Our results revealed marked differences in the writing processes. In the case of planning, young learners receiving WCF made more frequent use of the planning process and increased the time spent on it in comparison with participants in the control group (who did not have access to feedback). This has indicated that children spend more time to planning than what resaerch with adult or high school EFL learners has revealed. As for the effects on formulation, the greatest impact was observed on the frequency of formulation episodes, which was larger in the group receiving WCF, and on the number of edits and words produced during formulation. The effect of the WCF was more clearly observed in the measure of frequency of revision episodes, and the experimental group increased the time spent on macroscopic revisions. All in all, our study has revealed that children strategically decided where and when to locate each of these writing processes. Regarding pausological behavior, our results revealed that the effect of WCF was more marked in pauses at word boundaries as well as sentence boundaries. WCF seems to mediate a great part of the aforementioned behavioural patterns. These findings were discussed from the perspective of i) enhancing our knowledge about young learners’ writing processes and pausological behaviour and thus to complement related previous theories, based on adult learners; ii) shedding light on the potential role of models as WCF to mediate such processes.