Acquisition of Writing in Second Language Spanish

Nas, Marly; Esch, Kees van

doi:10.1002/9781118584347.ch27

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 48 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Furthermore, Nas and Van Esch (2014, p. 492) state in their chapter on writing in the Handbook of Spanish Second Language Acquisition that, contrary to the many studies on English L2 writing in general, the research on Spanish second/foreign language writing is a fairly new avenue of research. Nas and Van Esch (2014) particularly underline the need for new empirical research that describes and explains in detail the units of analysis. In order to contribute to this research agenda for reading-to-write tasks in general, and for such tasks in Spanish as a foreign language in particular, we performed a reading-to-write experiment with 19 students from the master's programme in Professional Communication at the University of Antwerp.…”

Section: Background and Aimmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading-to-write tasks for professional purposes in Spanish as a foreign language

Vangehuchten

Leijten

Schrijver

2018

RESLA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A reading-to-write task is a complex cognitive activity. The aim of this study is to gain insight into the difficulties that advanced learners of Spanish as a foreign language for professional communication purposes experience when they have to perform a reading-to-write task. This insight will help to improve writing instruction and training for this particular type of students. In this study, 19 students of a one-year master’s programme in multilingual professional communication (level B2–C1 of theCommon European Framework of Reference for Languages,Council of Europe, 2001) were asked to carry out a reading-to-write task in Dutch, their mother tongue, and in Spanish at the beginning of the academic year. This task was repeated at the end of the academic year. On both occasions, the task was writing an informative synthesis of approximately 200–250 words using three digital source texts in Dutch and in Spanish pertaining to different text genres (i.e., a report from the European Union, a website, a newspaper article). The three source texts varied in lexical and syntactical complexity, content, style and discursive characteristics. All written products were evaluated by two independent raters. We found no general improvement in the reading-to-write task between the two moments, neither in the L1 nor in the L2. We did not find an improvement at sentence, text, or discourse level either. We will explore several explanations for this lack of improvement, based on theoretical models of foreign language acquisition and recent empirical writing research.

show abstract

Section: Background and Aimmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reading-to-write tasks for professional purposes in Spanish as a foreign language

Vangehuchten

Leijten

Schrijver

2018

RESLA

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

A Comprehensive, Research-based, Peer Review and Self-evaluation Module for Integration into Combined Composition Classes for Second (L2) and Heritage (HL) Language Learners of Spanish

Ryan

2019

JLTR

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Second (L2) and heritage (HL) language learners face a variety of similar challenges when they approach the writing of Spanish compositions. Practitioners have often suggested peer editing as a prefinal step to help identify student writing errors that can be corrected before submission of a final product. However, some studies reveal that student writers do not always trust feedback from their classmates and hesitate to follow through with peer recommendations to the same extent they will from their instructors. This paper suggests an enhancement to the traditional peer editing process that combines a semester-long training program in peer and self-evaluation along with a research-based instrument for a more comprehensive evaluation of Spanish compositions. The instrument is versatile enough to serve students who place at different levels of proficiency along both L2 and HL learner continuums. The paper argues that by becoming a better peer evaluator, one in turn becomes a better self-evaluator. This new process returns control to students, creates more self-reliant writers, and empowers them to significantly improve their essays prior to submission. The paper concludes with the suggestion that if students adopt this process and continue its use it for future compositions, they can eventually become sufficiently trained to the point at which application of evaluation criteria becomes part of their normal mental routine before submitting any written work.

show abstract

How Second (L2) and Heritage (HL) Language Learners Can Draw on Existing Knowledge to Overcome Common Discourse Issues in Spanish Compositions

Ryan

Parra-Guinaldo

2021

jltr

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Student error analysis is an area of investigation that can shed light on how students learn. It can also serve as a pedagogical tool to increase students’ awareness of the most common types of errors to avoid. Quality of student output, however, isn’t solely determined by the number of errors students make, but also the extent to which students successfully employ certain other discourse-related strategies to improve their compositions. This paper argues that, aside from grammatical concerns, and at least from a discourse point of view, students already possess much of the knowledge they need in order to write better compositions. Both second (L2) and heritage (HL) learners of Spanish typically already possess some advanced writing skills in English, but we have observed that when attempting to write in Spanish, many of these same students will resort to more remedial means of presenting and/or expressing their ideas. In other words, unaware that so many discourse skills are transferable from English to Spanish, students will not necessarily apply the same strategies, or at least to the same degree, as they would if writing a similar essay in English. This paper, therefore, provides ten tips that students can draw on to improve both the presentation and expression of their ideas in compositions. Recommendations are divided into two categories, the first being aspects a student should always keep in mind when approaching any piece of writing, while the second are negative tendencies that are quite common, but which a student should necessarily avoid.

show abstract

Acquisition of Writing in Second Language Spanish

Cited by 3 publications

References 48 publications

Reading-to-write tasks for professional purposes in Spanish as a foreign language

Reading-to-write tasks for professional purposes in Spanish as a foreign language

A Comprehensive, Research-based, Peer Review and Self-evaluation Module for Integration into Combined Composition Classes for Second (L2) and Heritage (HL) Language Learners of Spanish

How Second (L2) and Heritage (HL) Language Learners Can Draw on Existing Knowledge to Overcome Common Discourse Issues in Spanish Compositions

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About