Background to L2 Writing
“Writing for L2 students was until the 1970s, primarily perceived as language practice, designed to help students manipulate grammatical forms or utilise newly learned vocabulary items “(Ferris, 2002:p. 3). An example will be `write about what you did last week` which practises the past tense form. Teachers used to adopt a product approach which focuses on correcting all language errors rather than organisation or ideas of the text. Teachers will mark each writing piece as the final draft and assume students will not repeat their mistakes again in future writings (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996).
“However in the 1970s, native English speaking composition practitioners and theorists began to focus on writers themselves and on the process they used to write texts” (Ferris, 2002: p. 4). This led to major paradigm shift from product approach to process approach and had implications on L1 writers and consequently L2 writers adopted the process model as well focusing more on ideas rather than the accuracy of the written work (Ferris, 2002).
(Zamel, 1985) was among the main advocates to encourage the idea of allowing insights from L1 to encourage L2 writing, however studies showed that “pedagogical suggestions designed for L1 writers needed to be critically revaluated before transferring it to L2 writers” (Ferris, 2002: p.4). Among the many distinctions is that L2 writers’ errors often relate to incorrect transfer from their L1 and inadequate acquisition of L2 (Ferris, 2002).
Controversy surrounding corrective feedback
Teachers give students CF for many reasons, first they believe CF is part of their job and is expected of them from parents, students and stakeholders. It is also because students can revise their ...
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29. Straub, R. (1997). Students' reactions to teacher comments: An exploratory study. Research in the Teaching of English, 91-119.
30. TeachawayInc (2005) Preparatory year programmes (PYP) in Saudi Arabia. Available from http://www.teachaway.com/teaching-english-saudi-arabia/preparatory-year-programmes[ Date accessed: 10 January 2014]
31. Truscott, J. (1996). The case against grammar correction in L2 writing classes. Language Learning, 46(2), 327-369.
32. Truscott, J., & Hsu, A. Y. (2008). Error correction, revision, and learning. Journal of Second Language Writing, 17, 292-305
33. Van Beuningen, C. G., De Jong, N. H., & Kuiken, F. (2012). Evidence on the effectiveness of comprehensive error correction in second language writing. Language Learning, 62(1), 1-41.
34. Zamel, V. (1985). Responding to student writing. TESOL Quarterly, 19, 79-101.
exists, to what extent does it affect second language proficiency? Many studies seem to have proven that the critical hypothesis exists because apparently no adult after puberty has been successful in achieving native-like proficiency. On the contrary, some believe that there is no reason for such hypothesis because some late learners have been able to attain a native-like fluency. There is obviously a certain decline in the ability to learn a second language with age. The reason for this remains
Introduction Through the years, language teachers, psychologists and others have had varying ideas of how languages are learned. Second language acquisition has multiple models, including cognitive based models, sociocultural models, and models regarding input and interaction. In this paper, my goal is to take one prominent model of SLA, the interactionist model, and determine how this model actually plays out in the classroom. I seek to answer the following questions: How does interaction support
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systematic study of a pair of languages with a view to identifying their structural differences and similarities between the first language and the target language . Contrastive Analysis was extensively used in the 1960s and early 1970s as a method of explaining why some features of a Target Language were more difficult to acquire than others. Contrastive analysis is concerned with the comparison of two languages for the purpose of translation and foreign language teaching . The contrastive