Exploring writing processes in authentic writing tasks: A multimodal mixed-method approach

Abstract

Writing is a critical skill in many academic and professional contexts, and multilingual writers often struggle to learn and master it. Understanding the processes and products involved in writing in these contexts is crucial to design better interventions and resources to help writers succeed in their writing endeavors. Yet, writing studies exploring the writing processes in authentic communicative situations are still scarce, partly due to the complexity of natural writing processes. In the article, we present a pedagogically and methodologically innovative task to explore multilingual writers’ processes and products when writing authentic texts. The task combines a range of unintrusive instruments that allow us to observe the writing processes (keystroke logging and screen recorder), collect writers’ perceptions and goals (writing logs, survey, and discussion) and assess their text's evolution, an extended research article abstract. The analysis integrates all data sources into Episodes to understand how and why writing processes and texts evolve. In the article, we describe the task in detail and discuss the main pedagogical and methodological benefits, as well as the challenges and future lines for writing research and teaching.