Individual variation in the upper primary school classroom-analyses of written production in EFL by ten young learners in the Baltic States, Russia, and Sweden

Abstract

In language learning classrooms there is great variation in language proficiency which is a challenge for the language teacher. Several factors can explain these individual differences such as the learners’ cognitive skills and the amount of exposure (Muñoz 2008), the learner’s personality (Ortega 2009: 193-196), and the factor “openness to experience” (Verhoeven and Vermeer 2002). These individual differences are possible to identify and describe by linguistic analyses of the vocabulary and the structural complexity in the texts. In the present study, ten 12-year-olds’ written production is described. The production by two young learners who produced a long and a short text respectively and from five different regions in the Baltic Region was investigated. The results show that production by the writers of long texts and the writers of short texts show great similarities no matter the educational, language, or cultural background of the young learner.