The Writing Process of Bilingual Students with Focus on Revisions and Spelling Errors in Their Final Texts

Elisabeth Zetterholm,Eva Lindström

doi:10.3390/languages7010061

Abstract

Research on writing that focuses on what writers do when they compose shows that processes such as planning, transfer to writing and editing are recursive and affect the writing process of first and second language writers differently. To our knowledge, what has yet to be explored in research is the writing process of young bilingual students. The present study focused on the revisions and spelling errors made by 9-year-old bilingual students during a writing activity in their L2. Details about the writing process (e.g., revisions) were taken from statistics registered in the keystroke logging program ScriptLog and were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results from the quantitative analysis show that the mean proportion of the students’ revisions is relatively low compared to results in previous research. The qualitative analysis showed both surface and meaning changes; the latter were found at both the micro- and macrostructural levels. Bilingual students exhibit a creative writing process in which several meaning changes occur in a language (in this case Swedish) that they are particularly competent in. The spelling error analysis indicated that the bilingual students make the same type of spelling errors as monolingual students in their initial stages of learning to write.

Highlights

Writing a text is cognitively demanding for all writers and even more so for second language writers
The present study focused on the revisions1 and spelling errors made by 9-year-old bilingual students in a writing activity on computers
Results from the analyses are presented first from the quantitative analysis consisting of different measures of text lengths, supplemented by measures of revisions made during the two writing occasions by the bilingual students, all of them anonymous

Summary

Introduction

Writing a text is cognitively demanding for all writers and even more so for second language writers. Previous studies have found that second language writers spend more time finding the appropriate word or deciding on the form of the language compared to first language writers (Cumming 2001; Silva 1993). One model from research on writing that focuses on what writers do when they compose a text is that by Hayes and Flower (1980), which has three main components: planning, transfer to writing and editing. These three processes are recursive and compete for cognitive capacity, meaning that the more automatized a particular process is, the less cognitive capacity it requires. Global revisions of a text and meaning changes might require a higher cognitive effort compared to revisions of errors at the surface level, e.g., spelling errors involving lower cognitive effort (Piolat et al 2004)

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