How Does the Language Control of L1 and L2 Writers Develop Over Time in First-Year Composition?

IF 1.9 1区文学 Q2 COMMUNICATION

Written Communication Pub Date : 2022-07-11 DOI:10.1177/07410883221099474

G. Eckstein, Ruei-Han Chang

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Most U.S. colleges and universities expect students to improve their writing ability by taking first-year composition (FYC) courses. In such courses, non-native English (L2) writers with diverse language backgrounds study alongside their native English (L1) speaking peers. However, it is not clear how different these populations are in terms of their language development over time, leaving questions unanswered about whether L2 writers develop more or less than L1 writers in an FYC curriculum. To investigate, we compared 75 L1 and L2 students’ written accuracy, fluency, and lexical and syntactic complexity over the semester of an FYC course. Data showed that L2 students had significantly higher rates of language error and less fluent and lexically complex writing compared to L1 writers. Moreover, L2 student writing became less grammatically accurate over 14 weeks despite showing greater fluency and syntactic complexity. These results suggest a need for plurilingual pedagogies in FYC that embrace diversity and inclusion while also providing L2 writers with instruction on socially powerful and dominant linguistic forms.

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在第一年的写作中，母语和第二语言作者的语言控制是如何随着时间的推移而发展的?

大多数美国学院和大学都希望学生通过第一年的写作课程来提高他们的写作能力。在这些课程中，具有不同语言背景的非母语英语(L2)作家与母语英语(L1)的同龄人一起学习。然而，随着时间的推移，这些人群在语言发展方面的差异有多大尚不清楚，这就留下了一个悬而未决的问题，即在FYC课程中，第二语言写作者的发展是比第一语言写作者的发展多还是少。为了进行研究，我们比较了75名L1和L2学生在FYC课程学期中的书面准确性、流畅性、词汇和句法复杂性。数据显示，与母语作者相比，第二语言学生的语言错误率明显更高，写作不流畅，词汇不复杂。此外，在14周的时间里，第二语言学生的写作在语法准确性上有所下降，尽管他们表现出了更大的流畅性和句法复杂性。这些结果表明，FYC需要多语教学法，既要包容多样性和包容性，又要向第二语言作者提供具有社会影响力和主导地位的语言形式的指导。

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来源期刊

Written Communication COMMUNICATION-

CiteScore

3.90

自引率

15.80%

发文量

期刊介绍： Written Communication is an international multidisciplinary journal that publishes theory and research in writing from fields including anthropology, English, education, history, journalism, linguistics, psychology, and rhetoric. Among topics of interest are the nature of writing ability; the assessment of writing; the impact of technology on writing (and the impact of writing on technology); the social and political consequences of writing and writing instruction; nonacademic writing; literacy (including workplace and emergent literacy and the effects of classroom processes on literacy development); the social construction of knowledge; the nature of writing in disciplinary and professional domains.