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

Abstract

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.

Mapping Master’s Students’ Use of External Sources in Source-Based Writing in L1 and L2

“…Relevant questions are whether it would be useful to have students focus on specific activities in specific intervals during the process, such as first reading of the sources (consulting dictionaries only for interpretation problems), then planning the text and in the final phase formulating the text (using sources for synonyms, findings equivalents in L2, etc. ; Vangehuchten, Leijten, & Schrijver, 2018). As several recent studies on the role of the working memory in writing suggest (e.g., Zabihi, 2018 for L2; Medimorec & Risko, 2016 for L1), the cognitive load of a reading-to-write task makes it difficult to be proficient in all the required competences (content, accuracy, fluency) at once.…”

Source-Based Writing in Professional Spanish as a Foreign Language: Some Pedagogical Insights Based on a Quali-Quantitative Approach

“…The diversity of topics and textual genres corresponds to the variety of sources the writers have to deal with. The difference in profile between the student writers and the target audience was deliberately chosen to increase the complexity of the task (Leijten et al, 2017(Leijten et al, , 2019Vangehuchten et al, 2018). It allowed us to test whether the students, who were assumed to have advanced reading and writing skills, were able to write a new coherent text for a younger target audience.…”