a critical review of writing in a fl and pedagogy approaches

A Critical Review of Foreign Language Writing Research on Pedagogical ApproachesAuthor(s): Melinda ReicheltSource: The Modern Language Journal, Vol. 85, No. 4 (Winter, 2001), pp. 578-598Published by: Wiley on behalf of the National Federation of Modern Language Teachers AssociationsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1193077 .

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A Critical Review of Foreign Language Writing Research on Pedagogical Approaches MELINDA REICHELT English Department University of Toledo Toledo, OH 43606 Email: [email protected]

This article reviews 32 studies regarding writing in a foreign language (not English) in the United States. It focuses on research that investigates relationships between various pedagogical practices (e.g., explicit grammar instruction) or task types assigned (e.g., descriptive vs. narrative writing) and the texts produced by foreign language (FL) writers. Topics addressed include explicit grammar instruction, computer use, task type, strategy training, process instruction, and feedback. This article points to the lack of a unified sense of the purpose of FL writing within the field of FL and also points to design flaws in much of the existing research. Implications for pedagogy and research are discussed.

WITHIN THE FIELD OF SECOND LANGUAGE (L2) writing, most of the existing research relates to writing in English as a Second or Foreign Lan- guage (ESL or EFL; from here on, for simplicity's sake, ESL). In many respects, such work is useful for foreign language (FL) writing instructors, and many FL writing researchers have drawn on studies of ESL writing in their own research (e.g., Aziz, 1995; Chastain, 1990; Koda, 1993). How- ever, significant differences exist between writing in ESL and writing in a FL in the U.S. context. One main difference is that, unlike ESL students, FL students are rarely if ever called upon to write in the target language (TL) in classes outside FL departments. Further differences stem from several sources. First, much ESL research is done in contexts in which the TL is the language of the broader community, which is not the case for FL writing research. Second, many ESL teachers are native English speakers (at least in the research reported) whereas many FL teachers are not native speakers of the TL. Third, in contrast to other TLs, English plays a unique role as a world

language, including that of the medium of higher education in many cases.

Although the majority of research about writing in a L2 investigates ESL writing, a body of research about writing in a FL (other than En- glish) exists, as described by the author (Reichelt, 1999), who provided an overview of over 200 sources related to research and pedagogical literature on writing in a FL. The present article focuses on the results of part of that body of research-namely, the work that investigates the relationships between various pedagogical practices (e.g., explicit grammar instruction) or task types assigned (e.g., descriptive vs. narrative writing) and the texts produced by FL writers in the United States.1

This review highlights one particularly significant problem within the body of FL writing research: the lack of a unified sense of the purpose of writing within the FL curriculum. In the native language (L1; here, English) and ESL writing literature, specialists continue to debate the purpose of composition instruction delivered through English departments. Whereas some have argued in favor of teaching students to write for various disciplines (e.g., Horowitz, 1986), Spack (1988) argued that "the best we can accom- plish is to create programs in which students can

The Modern LanguageJournal, 85, iv, (2001) 0026-7902/01/578-598 $1.50/0 @2001 The Modern Language Journal



Melinda Reichelt 579

learn general inquiry strategies, rhetorical principles, and tasks that can transfer to other course work" (pp. 40-41). And Silva, Reichelt, and Lax- Farr (1994) have questioned the very existence of a general writing ability.

Within the field of FL writing in the United States, given the fact that FL students are not likely to be called upon to write in the TL in courses other than FL courses, questions about the purpose of writing in a FL are even more confounding than those in L1 (English) or ESL. Thus, FL writing professionals need to discuss the purpose of writing in the FL classroom; to begin to do this, it is necessary to grapple with the difficult issue of what role FL writing plays outside the classroom in this era of increased globali- zation and cultural diversity. With English as the new world language, will individuals be able to achieve success with writing skills only in English, or will writing proficiency in other languages be important as well? In other words, what role, if any, will writing in FLs play for students outside the FL classroom? And within the FL classroom itself, what is the purpose of writing: Is it to work on accuracy in orthography and morphology? to reinforce and learn new vocabulary? to practice various syntactic structures? to provide further experience in purposive use of the TL through interaction and creation of meaning? to learn to create compositions appropriate for some particular audience and purpose? to learn and communicate about aspects of the TL, including literature and culture? to support acquisition of speaking, reading, and listening skills? (See Reichelt, 1999, for a more extensive discussion of issues surrounding the purpose of writing in the FL curriculum.) Even if those involved in the discussion do not agree on the purpose or purposes of writing in the FL curriculum, further discussion of the issue would help FL professionals in examining assumptions about the purpose of writing in the FL classroom and encourage informed pedagogical decision making regarding writing instruction.

In addition to the lack of clarity concerning the purpose of writing in the FL curriculum, there is a great deal of inconsistency in FL writing research in the means used to analyze student writing samples. In fact, within FL writing research, there are almost as many ways of defining what "good writing" is as there are FL writing researchers. (See Leki, 1995, and Li, 1996, for a discussion of this issue within ESL and L1 writing.) For example, Lalande (1982) considered only grammatical factors in his analysis of student writing; Cooper and Morain (1980), Cooper

(1981), and Caruso (1994) considered only syntactic complexity; and Herrmann (1990) and McGuire (1997) used holistic ratings. More typi- cally, researchers have used combinations of several criteria in analyzing student writing samples. For example, Martinez-Lage (1992) considered grammatical accuracy and syntactic complexity; Chastain (1990) used the criteria of fluency, sentence length and complexity, grammatical accuracy, content, and organization; and Aziz (1995) used grammatical agreement, content, and vocabulary. This inconsistency in the criteria used for analyzing student writing samples not only reveals a lack of clarity on the part of FL specialists concerning the purpose of writing in the FL curriculum, but it also makes comparison of findings across studies rather difficult.

The following overview of studies of FL writing aims to familiarize readers with the body of work in FL writing, an important goal given the fact that, at this point, there seems to be little sense of shared assumptions and no comprehensive research agenda regarding FL writing, and, in addition, it often seems that researchers in the field are not aware of each other's works. Topics addressed include the effects of grammar treatment, computer use, task type, classroom activities, strategy use, process instruction, and teacher feedback. This overview also points out design flaws in the current research in the hope that researchers will avoid such problems in the future. (See Appendix for information about the focus, participants, research design, and claims of the studies reviewed here.)

EFFECTS OF GRAMMAR TREATMENT

Four studies, Frantzen (1995), Manley and Calk (1997), Cooper and Morain (1980), and Cooper (1981) investigated the effect of explicit grammar instruction on students' writing with varying results. In her study of 44 intermediate Spanish students in a university-level Hispanic culture and conversation course, Frantzen found no clear overall advantage in writing for students who received explicit grammar instruction. In the study, students in a treatment group received 10 to 15 minutes per day (three times per week) of grammar review (conducted in the TL) that focused on verb and pronoun usage; they also wrote two in-class essays, on which all of their errors were corrected, and five out-of-class essays, on which the location of their errors was indicated but not corrected. For these five essays, the students were asked to correct the errors, and the correct forms were supplied by the instructor at



580 The Modern Language Journal 85 (2001)

the end. Students in another group received no grammar review; the errors in all of their essays were circled or underlined, but the correct forms were not supplied. Frantzen compared the beginning- and end-of-semester writing of these two groups, who wrote about the same topic: their most memorable experience. Both groups showed improvement in tense, aspect, and a weighted grammar measure; the nongrammar group improved on use of the indicative whereas the grammar group worsened slightly; and both groups decreased in accuracy on stem morphology, but the grammar group decreased less than the nongrammar group.

One problem with Frantzen's (1995) research design is that there were two different experimental treatments: grammar review and error correction. It is possible that one treatment had positive effects and the other had negative effects, but because the two were combined, it is impossible to determine whether or not this was the case. A better research design would have alternated only one treatment variable. Addition- ally, because both groups received some sort of grammar correction, it is impossible to determine whether or not correction had an overall helpful effect on grammatical accuracy, given the fact that both groups worsened on the use of stem morphology. If one group had received no grammar correction, it would have been easier to determine the effect of the grammar correction. Finally, it is possible that the students showed improvement between their first and second writing samples because of a practice effect; because they were already quite familiar with the topic the second time they wrote about it, they might have been able to expend less effort on generating content and more effort on improving their accuracy. Thus, the claim about improvement on tense, aspect, and a weighted grammar measure must be viewed with skepticism.

Manley and Calk (1997) reported positive results of grammar instruction in their study of 14 students in a university-level advanced French composition course. The students turned in five compositions over the course of a semester. The first essay was entitled "A Banquet"; the second was entitled "A Portrait"; the third was about a cultural topic of the student's choice; the fourth was entitled "My Hopes and Projects for the Fu- ture"; and the fifth was about an event of the student's choice occurring in his or her past. Each set of the first four compositions was examined in order to find a grammar area with which students had significant difficulty, and then a grammar lesson on that point was given, in each

case with a different language teaching approach. The researchers compared the number of student errors made on the selected grammar point in each of the first four compositions used for analysis with the number of errors on the same four grammar points in the fifth composition. Students made significant improvement in three of the four grammar points targeted-noun-adjective agreement, possessive adjective use, and definite article use-but not in the use of the passe compose. However, when the first and final essays (with all errors but the targeted ones corrected) were scored holistically, with native- French-speaking instructors asked to decide which of the two essays was "better," no significant differences were found between the first and final essays. (The authors indicated that there were problems with rater reliability and lack of speci- ficity in instructions given to raters.) A problem with this study and the researchers' interpretation of its results as positive is that without a nontreatment control group, there is no evidence that the improvement in grammar resulted from grammatical instruction rather than from practice over time. This is an especially salient point in light of Frantzen's (1995) findings of improvement on grammatical accuracy in writing even in her "nongrammar" group, as well as other authors' findings of improvement with practice (e.g., Herrmann, 1990; McGuire, 1997).

Cooper and Morain (1980) investigated a rather different type of grammar instruction-sentence combining-and found positive results in terms of improvement in the syntactic complexity of students' writing. Their study investigated the effects of sentence combining on the syntactic complexity of 130 third-quarter students of French. The students in the experimental group received extensive (60 to 150 minutes per week) practice with sentence combining at the sentence, paragraph, and essay level, whereas the students in the other group received the "traditional writing practice" offered by their workbook exercises. Two types of pre- and posttest writing were collected: a rewrite of a kernel-sentence passage and a free-write; in addition, two compositions from near the end of the quarter were collected. Analysis of the writing indicated that students in the sentence-combining group outperformed students in the other group on seven out of nine measures of syntactic complexity. (No measures of the quality of the essays' content were taken.) Cooper (1981) described a similar study involving a larger corpus of data (with 325 participants), one which also included information concerning the performance of German and




Spanish students as well as French students; he reported similar results.

At this point, because so little research has been published on the relationship between explicit grammar instruction and gains in writing proficiency, it would be inappropriate to draw strong conclusions in this area. Given that students appear to show improvement in grammatical accuracy with practice, whether or not they receive explicit grammar instruction, researchers need to employ control groups in their studies of grammar instruction if claims are to be made about the effects of grammar instruction on accuracy in writing. Given Cooper and Morain's (1980) and Cooper's (1981) findings regarding sentence combining, use of sentence combining activities may initially appear appealing. How- ever, the treatment and results of this study focus on only one aspect of writing-syntactic complexity. Given a broader conception of FL writing as a communicative activity, and given the fact that in Cooper and Morain's study, no ratings of the quality of the content or communicative effectiveness of the essays were undertaken, implications of the findings can only be described as limited. Regarding all research related to grammar instruction, if the purpose of students engaging in FL writing is to improve not only their grammatical accuracy or syntactic complexity, or both, in writing, but also the quality of the content of their writing, then FL research should also investigate the overall communicative suc- cessfulness of the writing produced in their studies-especially in light of the fact that in Manley and Calk's (1997) study, despite improvement in grammatical accuracy, holistic ratings of student essays did not improve.

COMPUTER USE

The issue of the purpose of writing within the FL curriculum is also raised by the research conducted on the effects of computer use on FL composition. Herrmann (1990), Leh (1997), McGuire (1997), Ittzes (1997), Florez-Estrada (1995), Trenchs (1996), and Nirenberg (1989) investigated the effects on FL composition of computer use, either for drill-type computer- assisted language learning (CALL), or interactive writing such as email, or word processing.

Herrmann (1990), Leh (1997), and McGuire (1997) investigated the impact of computer use on gains in writing proficiency. Although all three studies had problems in research design, their findings suggested that computer use may have little effect on students' subsequent writing of

compositions. In Herrmann's study, 24 students enrolled in two sections of third-quarter university-level French used the computer for two different purposes. One section, the agentive group, used it to drill and practice language structures while the other section, the instrumental group, used it collaboratively to produce a newspaper, which involved the use of email communication among class members. At both the beginning and the end of the quarter, each student completed the same two at-home writing assignments deal- ing with university life, one a description of what university life might be like in the year 2000, and one a letter to a French friend about the student's current life in the university. Students were told to spend 1 hour writing each assignment. Writing samples were rated on a 10-point holistic scale; comparison of the ratings indicated no significant gains or losses in writing proficiency in either group. Herrmann suggested possible explanations for this lack of change: The language practice invoked in both the agentive and instrumental contexts of computer use may not have created conditions that fostered growth in composition writing; and students may have been bored, and thus less motivated, when responding at the end of the study to the same two writing prompts used at the beginning of the study. In addition, the results of this study must be inter- preted with caution because students wrote the essays under noncontrolled conditions and thus may have used varying amounts of time to write the essays and various amounts of outside re- sources.

Leh (1997) also investigated the effects of interactive computer use on students' subsequent compositions. In this study of 35 fifth-semester Spanish students and email use, one group of students corresponded with email pen pals in Mexico for 10 weeks, while another group did not. Students in the email group were told they could do as much or little emailing as they de- sired; the amount they wrote ranged from one student who wrote no messages to one who wrote 20 messages (4,865 words). A comparison of the students' first three and last three scores on essays written for the course (out of a total of 12 essays written over the course of the semester) indicated no significant difference between the two groups writing performance. However, the fact that students in the email group varied so widely in terms of how much they wrote makes these results difficult to interpret.

McGuire (1997) also investigated the relationship between interactive writing via computer and gains in writing proficiency. In this study of




127 fourth-semester Spanish students, participants in an experimental group were trained in and used MundoHispano (www.umsl.edu/ -moosproj/mundo.html), a synchronous computer conferencing tool in which students have conversations within a text-based virtual replica of famous parts of Madrid, and were assigned to spend at least 1 hour per week (for 12 weeks) out of class participating in computer conversations using MundoHispano. Students in the control group were assigned 12 hours of out-of-class "enrichment activities," such as watching a film in Spanish and writing a synopsis of it in Spanish. (Each enrichment activity included some writing.) Of the experimental and control group participants, 31% completed all assigned out-of-class work related to the study, and more than half completed at least 90% of all the work. At the beginning and end of the term in which the study was conducted, all participants completed a 30- minute in-class writing assignment. The beginning-of-term prompt asked students to write letters to Spanish pen pals describing their holiday activities, a typical day of their college life, and their roommates or a professor. The end-of-term prompt asked students to describe an important incident in their lives. Holistic ratings of participants' writing indicated no statistically significant gains in either group's writing proficiency.

Like Herrmann (1990), McGuire (1997) suggested that the lack of transfer of writing skills from MundoHispano activities to compositions may be due to the fact that the writing style of participants in MundoHispano is "spontaneous and conversational in nature, with many starts and stops, incomplete sentences, comments, and repetitive questions which receive short answers" (p. 79) and thus does not parallel the kind of writing done for compositions. However, problems with interpreting the results of this study are not confined to the lack of parallelism between the writing students undertook in the treatment phase, on the one hand, and the writing elicited by the measurement prompts, on the other hand. Besides this lack of parallelism, there was no real control group because the so-called control group participated in enrichment activities; thus, the research investigated not simply the effects of participation in MundoHispano on writing proficiency, but rather the difference between participation in MundoHispano and participation in enrichment activities, all of which involved some writing. In addition, the fact that there was wide variation in how much of either treatment participants actually completed complicates interpretation of the results of this study.

Despite the flaws in these three studies, they make an important contribution by pointing to the difference between interactive writing via computer and the writing of compositions. This difference in turn points to the issue of what the goal of writing in the FL classroom is; if it is solely to prepare students to write traditional compositions, then interactive computer writing may not be appropriate for achieving those goals, although better-designed research is needed to test the effects of interactive writing via computer on students' writing of traditional compositions. However, whatever the outcome of such research, interactive computer writing may be appropriate if students have a need for interactive computer writing in the FL, or if such writing is deemed motivating or a factor that supports overall L2 acquisition-especially given the findings of Ittzes (1997) and Florez-Estrada (1995), which indicate that interactive computer-mediated writing is of higher quality than noncom- puter writing.

Ittzes (1997) compared the writing produced by one group of 40 intermediate German students when they were computer conferencing among themselves and when they were writing in more traditional (non-computer-mediated) group journals. Under each writing condition, students were given a choice of topics, some personal and some relating to public life and po- litical issues. Topics included, for example, the difference between a friend and an acquain- tance and the fact that, in Europe as well as in the United States, the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. In the areas of grammatical accuracy, lexical richness, and comprehensibility, native speaker judges gave higher ratings to the computer conferencing writing than to the writing done in traditional journals.

In Florez-Estrada's (1995) comparison of interactive writing via computer with traditional journaling, which involved 28 university students in third-year Spanish, students in one group engaged in email exchange and online dialogue with native-Spanish-speaking partners while students in another group wrote in interactive paper journals with their teachers. Analysis of the texts produced by students in each group indicated that the computer group outperformed the other group on appropriate use of key grammar points (ser vs. estar, the preterite vs. the imperfect, and por vs. para) and on depth and breadth of content. The researcher noted that in interpreting these results, one must keep in mind the fact that students in the computer group spent-voluntar- ily-three times as much time writing as did the




students in the other group, presumably because the writing task was more motivating or appealing. Additionally, it is important in interpreting these results to consider that students in the two groups were not only writing with different media but writing for different audiences-their native- Spanish-speaking partners on the one hand and their teacher on the other.

In light of Ittzes' (1997) and Florez-Estrada's (1995) findings that texts produced under interactive computer conditions are of higher quality and more interactive than writing produced without computers, more research on the role of writing in fostering TL acquisition needs to be conducted. If writing can be shown to foster TL acquisition, then having students engage in such higher-quality writing could be an important means of promoting overall TL development. Furthermore, given our society's increasing use of email for worldwide communication, students may engage in more interactive writing in the FL outside the FL classroom than in writing traditional compositions in the FL; this possibility would also support use of interactive computer writing in the FL classroom.

Other research related to computer use and FL writing includes work by Trenchs (1996) and Nirenberg (1989). Trenchs's qualitative, non- comparative study investigated email use by much younger writers-3 sixth-grade learners of Span- ish. She found that the quality of the email messages that students wrote did not correlate with their level of computer use or with the different ways students used the technology, but rather with their writing behaviors and linguistic skill. Examination of students' texts as well as writing processes indicated that "students experiment with linguistic forms and integrate old and new information sources in order to communicate, but they do not always succeed" (p. 464). Trenchs argued that in computer use in the FL classroom, a balance is needed between initial teacher guid- ance, including the presentation of guidelines for peer collaboration, and subsequent student free- dom. Trenchs's research not only serves as an indicator of the potential value of email, especially in terms of encouraging student risk-taking, but also provides warnings about its limitations and offers advice concerning precautions teachers might take, given those limitations.

Nirenberg's (1989) study investigated the effects of word processing on fluency in student writing. In this study, 57 Spanish students in beginning and advanced university-level classes were randomly assigned to an experimental word processing group or to a control group that wrote

in longhand. Participants in both groups were assigned a total of four essays. Students in the experimental group wrote the first and third essays using word processing and the other two essays in longhand; students in the control group wrote all four assigned essays in longhand. The first and third essays from both groups were compared. (For the first and third essays, beginning students in both the groups wrote on the topics "My Family" and "My Personal Description" while the advanced students wrote about "My First Date" and "What Is Necessary for One To Be Successful.") Comparison of the fluency of these texts (based on word count) indicated that prior experience with word processing did not have a significant impact on whether students increased their fluency when using word processing. In addition, although the word processing group overall did not outperform the longhand group on gains in fluency, the advanced group that used word processing did outperform the longhand group on gains in fluency.

Nirenberg's (1989) research indicates that for some students, word processing may help them increase their fluency in writing in a FL. However, in interpreting Nirenberg's results, it must be noted that because the four tasks assigned were very different from one another, and because some students were asked to write about topics they may have preferred to keep private, attribut- ing the results to the use of the word processor may be an error; it is possible that some of the differences in fluency were related not to an interaction between student level and word processor use, but to student level and task prompt. For example, it is possible that some students had not yet experienced their first date or, if they had, were reluctant to divulge much information about it. Furthermore, because no overall rating of the quality of the essays was undertaken, the study does not provide any information about the effects of word processing on the quality of student writing.

TASK TYPE: TEXT COMPARISONS

Martinez-Lage (1992), Koda (1993), Paulson (1993), McKee (1980), Chavez (1996), and Chas- tain (1990) investigated the texts produced by students who were assigned writing tasks other than those involving computer use. These authors compared the writing of one or more groups of students on more than one task type and found differences in performance depend- ing on the type of task assigned.

Martinez-Lage (1992) studied the writing of 23




second-year university Spanish students and compared samples of two types of writing-traditional teacher-assigned compositions and dialogue journals free from concern with form-taken at the beginning, middle, and end of the semester. Comparison of the writing indicated that the dialogue journal writing was syntactically as complex as the teacher-assigned compositions (except that the T-units in the teacher-assigned writing were significantly longer) and that it was grammatically more accurate than the teacher-assigned compositions. A longitudinal study of the dialogue journal writing indicated that the length of the dialogue journal entries increased over the course of the semester, as did the syntactic complexity. The overall quality of the essays was not measured.

In separate studies, two authors, Koda (1993) and Paulson (1993), compared the writing produced when students were assigned task types drawn from traditional modes of writing. Koda examined the writing of 25 first- and second-year college students of Japanese who completed descriptive and narrative writing tasks. The results indicated no significant difference between the two text types in terms of text length, sentence length, vocabulary, and subordinate clause use. Topical structural analysis of the texts indicated that sequential topical progression was more common in the narrative than in the descriptive writing, which contained more parallel progression than the narrative writing. Quality ratings of the narrative writing correlated positively with the degree of sequential progression evident in the text, and quality ratings of descriptive writing corresponded with topical depth present in the text. Additionally, in the descriptive task, diversity of vocabulary was most highly correlated with overall quality, whereas in the narrative writing, the number of logographic Kanji characters was the factor most highly correlated with overall quality, followed by vocabulary diversity. The results pointed to a strong positive correlation between text length and quality on both tasks. Fur- ther results indicated that narrative writing may demand more difficult linguistic processing than descriptive writing.

In Paulson's (1993) study, which also compared the writing done under different task conditions, 89 intermediate-level learners of Spanish each read a passage about the role of Latinos in the 1992 Los Angeles riots and completed a writing task with one of three different foci. One task related to informing: asking students to focus on what they thought other university students might not know about the subject. Another task related to explaining: directing students to focus

on the main problem raised by the passage. Fi- nally, one task asked students to focus on writing a "well-organized, well-written essay, paying attention to grammar, accents, and spelling" (p. 68). The students who completed the explanation task scored significantly higher than the others on holistic ratings of the writing as well as on individual analytic measures of information, explanation, and organization, and on the sum of four different analytic measures-information, explanation, organization, and language.

McKee (1980) compared the writing of 182 university-level, second- and third-quarter students of French across two tasks: Some students completed writing tasks in which they had to re- main themselves when writing, while others completed writing tasks which required them to take on the role of another person. Comparison of the student texts indicated no significant differences in the amount produced, but writing in which students remained themselves was syntactically more complex than writing in which students took on another person's role, and for second- (but not third-) quarter students, writing in which students remained themselves contained longer sentences. No measurement of the overall quality of the texts was undertaken.

The results of the relevant research suggest that different task types are likely to lead students to produce texts with differing characteristics, which may be an important issue for FL writing instructors and test designers to consider. Espe- cially important issues for those involved in de- signing writing assessment instruments include Martinez-Lage's (1992) findings that writing that was free from focus on form was syntactically as complex and grammatically more accurate than writing in which form was emphasized, along with Paulson's (1993) similar finding that students did better on a writing task that emphasized explanation, not "writing well" (or informing). This information may lead FL specialists to consider de- creasing the emphasis on form in the instructions for tests of FL writing. Additionally, Koda's (1993) finding that narrative writing may be more difficult than descriptive writing and McKee's (1980) finding that students' writing was syntactically more complex when they remained themselves rather than taking on the role of another person may influence what type of tasks test designers include on the assessment instruments they design.

Two other reports of research regarding task type address the important issues of revision and differences between writing graded and ungraded work. Unfortunately, these studies exhibit




research design problems. In Chavez's (1996) study of revision, 37 third-semester college learners of German each wrote for 10 minutes on two topics requiring descriptive writing ("A Typical American Family" and "A Typical Student Week- end"). On one task, students were told to revise, while on the other, they were told not to. Analysis of the writing indicated that there were more morphological errors but fewer syntactic errors in revised writing. In revised writing, essays with more clauses contained fewer word order errors than essays that contained fewer clauses; in non- revised writing, morphological and overall errors were fewer in writings with more clauses than in writings with fewer clauses. In both revised and unrevised writing, errors, especially morphological ones, increased with an increase in complexity of the writing. One problem with interpreting these results relates to whether the writing task that students were given parallels the writing tasks given in FL classrooms. In fact, Chavez indicated that the reason students were given only 10 minutes to write was because "generous time limits could diminish performance differences among subjects" (p. 169). Thus, it may not be possible to generalize the above findings and apply them to situations in which students are given longer than 10 minutes to complete a writing task.

In another study (Chastain, 1990), the researcher investigated the writing of 14 university students in a 300-level Spanish composition course. For a graded paper, students wrote an argumentative essay on a topic of their own choosing, and for an ungraded paper, they wrote a comparison/contrast essay on a topic of their own choosing. Analysis of the student writing indicated that when writing for a grade, students wrote longer essays that contained longer, more complex sentences than the sentences in essays not written for a grade. The researcher found no significant difference between the tasks either in terms of type and number of errors or in terms of the quality of the content/organization of the essays. The fact that the students wrote different types of texts, which may have contributed to differences between the writing produced under graded and nongraded conditions, makes the results of this study difficult to interpret.

CLASSROOM READING/WRITING ACTIVITIES

Nummikoski (1991), Baudrand-Aertker (1992), Caruso (1994), and Uhlir (1995) examined the relationship between classroom reading or writing tasks, or both, and gains in writing profi-

ciency. Baudrand-Aertker conducted a study of 21 third-year high school French students who wrote in dialogue journals with their teacher. Stu- dents were assigned to write at least two entries per week over a 9-month period. The topics for the journal entries were open-ended, with students writing on a wide range of both personal and nonpersonal topics. The teacher responded to student journal entries, attending to the content of the writing rather than to grammatical accuracy. The students were assigned no other writing in French over the course of the school year. At the beginning and end of the school year, the students responded to four writing prompts, graded from easier to more difficult. The test was scored holistically according to the ACTFL writing proficiency scoring guidelines (American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, 1986). A comparison of the students' beginning- and end-of-year scores indicated significant improvement over the treatment period: Whereas the average score at the beginning of the school year was within the novice-mid/novice-high range, the average score at the end of the school year was within the intermediate-mid/intermediate high range. Although these results are very positive, one factor that must be considered in interpreting them is that the students wrote on the same topics for both the pretest and posttest. Thus, it is possible that part or all of the students' improvement could be accounted for by a practice effect.

Uhlir (1995) also investigated the effects of extensive writing, but this study was qualitative in nature, exploring the writing development of 6 students selected randomly from a group of 23 first-year Spanish eighth graders who participated in daily expressive writing. Journals, learning logs, teacher-student written dialogues, quarterly self-evaluations, end-of-year survey answers, and pen pal letters written throughout the school year were examined. Results are presented in the form of six vignettes, each designed to characterize one student's cognitive, affective, and metacognitive growth in the acquisition of Spanish, as evi- denced by his or her written work. The 6 students increased their fluency levels and their use of questions. In addition, in a comparison between end-of-year pen pal letters from the expressive writing group and writing done by students from a class in which expressive writing was not emphasized, the writing of the expressive writing group exhibited more words, more sentences, and more questions than the writing of the other group. Although these results reflect positively on expressive writing, interpretation of the results is



586 The Modern LanguageJournal 85 (2001)

complicated by the fact that no statistical tests were run to indicate whether or not the reported increases in fluency and question use or the differences between the expressive writing group and the other class were significant. Further- more, no information was given about what kind of writing, if any, was done by the nonexpressive writing comparison group.

Whereas Baudrand-Aertker (1992) and Uhlir (1995) investigated the impact of sustained writing on students' writing skills, Nummikoski (1991) investigated the effects of both reading and writing on 127 first-year Russian students. The participants were randomly divided into three groups: One group participated in interactive writing with the teacher, one group did reading only, and one group did writing only. Analysis of pre- and posttreatment cloze exercises (as a measure of reading) and pre- and posttreatment free-writing indicated no statistically significant advantage for the interactive writing group over the other two groups on gains in reading, writing fluency, or writing quality. When the data were grouped and examined according to student performance on pretests, the results indicated that among students who scored well on pretests, the students in the interactive writing group increased their writing fluency more than the students in the reading-only group. One problem with interpreting these results is that the pre- and posttest writing samples designed to measure writing fluency and quality were gathered in rather short and unequal time periods, of 5 and 10 minutes respectively, and the students were instructed to write in complete sentences that did not have to be related. Scoring for quality of writing was based on the sophistication and complexity of the sentence structure, vocabulary, quality of communication, and originality of ex- pression, but the "students were allowed to write unconnected ideas, without the requirement of global coherence" (p. 65). The very short time allowed for writing and the lack of coherence required are likely not typical of the time FL writers spend on writing tasks nor of the genres assigned in FL classrooms.

Caruso's (1994) research focused on the effects of extensive reading on writing proficiency in a group of 177 university-level Spanish learners. In this 9-week study, the experimental group spent the first 15 minutes of every class session reading and summarizing TL material, while the other group spent the first 15 minutes of class practicing speaking and writing. Analysis of the syntactic complexity (as measured by T-unit length) of pre- and posttreatment writing sam-

ples indicated that neither of the treatments had a significant impact on syntactic complexity. In this study, no overall measure of the quality of the student writing was undertaken.

This research on the impact of reading or writing, or both, on students' writing skills suggests that writing practice, but not experience in reading, had a positive impact on at least some aspects of the students' writing. If this is true, it chal- lenges the commonly held assumption that writers can improve through engaging in reading. However, as indicated in the discussion of the studies, the research is in many ways limited by problems in design. Thus, further research should investigate the effects of both reading and writing on students' writing proficiency.

STRATEGY USE

Aziz (1995) and Klohs (1994) investigated the relationship between training in strategy use and gains made in writing proficiency, with promising results. In Aziz's study, 72 second-semester university students of French were divided into two groups, a cognitive strategy training group and a metacognitive/cognitive strategy training group. Both groups were given instruction concerning writing a recapitulation based on a dictated passage. The cognitive training group was trained in the use of strategies including note-taking during dictation, reconstruction of the dictated passage, and error analysis. The metacognitive/cognitive group was trained in the same cognitive strategies, as well as in the metacognitive strategies of self-monitoring and self-evaluating while writing. Comparison of the pre- and posttraining essay tests indicated that the cognitive training group improved on ratings for grammatical agreement (involving usage of verbs, nouns, adjectives, arti- cles, and pronouns) but not on ratings of overall writing (including sentence structure, text structure and coherence, idiomatic expressions, vocabulary, and mechanics). In contrast, the students in the metacognitive/cognitive group improved on both grammatical agreement and overall writing, outperforming the cognitive group on both measures.

Klohs (1994) also investigated strategy training, focusing rather narrowly on improvements in one area-use of past tense verbs. In her study, 72 high school students of French were randomly assigned to either a control or a mnemonic strategy group. The mnemonic strategy group received training in the use of gestural, musical, rhythmic, and acronym-related strategies as aids in recalling past tense verb forms. Holistic ratings




of pre- and posttreatment essays focusing on the writers' abilities to differentiate two past tense verb forms indicated that both groups improved in this area, but the improvement of the mnemonic group was significantly greater than that of the control group. No rating of the overall quality of the essays was done.

The results of the small amount of research investigating strategy training in FL writing are promising; further research in this area should consider whether the main goal of strategy training is to help students improve grammatical accuracy, as in Klohs' (1994) study, to include other concerns, as in Aziz's (1995) work, or to include overall communicative effectiveness.

PROCESS INSTRUCTION

In the English L1 writing literature, process approaches to writing instruction and research have characterized much of the work of the 1980s (see, e.g., Cambourne, 1986; Flower & Hayes, 1981; and Yoshida, 1983). In addition, ESL writing research and practice has also focused on process approaches to writing (see, e.g., Ferris, 1995; Kelly, 1992; and Reyes, 1991). Recently, both pedagogical literature (e.g., Hall, 1993) and research in FL writing have also focused on process approaches to writing. Research into the effects on FL writers of the process approach or the use of pedagogical practices conventionally associated with process approaches have pointed to generally positive outcomes.

Both Gallego de Blibeche (1993) and Kern and Schultz (1992) investigated the relationship between explicit teaching of a process approach to writing and gains in writing proficiency, in both cases with promising results. In Gallego de Blibeche's study of 36 elementary-level college students of Spanish, over the course of 1 semester, students in an experimental group engaged in prewriting discussion, free writing, pair work, writing of a rough draft, and peer review for revision, while control group students received direct grammar instruction, including written grammar exercises, and wrote drafts of their compositions which were marked with a code for grammar errors by their instructor. The control group students were required to rewrite these essays, making the grammatical corrections indicated by the instructor. Analysis of pre- and posttreatment compositions of both groups indicated that the experimental process group outperformed the control group in their improvement on composition length and quality of organization but that the groups made equal gains in content, lan-

guage use, syntactic complexity, and reducing the number of errors.

Kern and Schultz (1992) reported on evaluation of a university-level third- and fourth-semester French program in which special attention was paid to explicit teaching of writing as a process, targeting especially the text-based argumentative essay, which is required in upper-level courses in the program. Four times throughout the school year, 73 students wrote a spontaneous, in-class timed essay (neither text-based nor argumentative). Analysis of the essays indicated that the students made improvements in their writing over the course of the year, with low-ability students appearing to benefit most from instruction that focused on thesis statement development, planning, and development of paragraphs, and high-ability writers benefitting from instruction that focused on refining interpretive analyses and on developing a personal voice in expressing ideas. Analysis of the syntactic complexity in the students' writing indicated that the mean length of T-units increased and then decreased over the course of the school year, perhaps, Kern and Schultz speculated, because students may acquire coordination first, then subordination, and finally clause reduction. No control group was used in this study.

Two studies, by Becker (1991) and Martinez- Gibson (1998), investigated prewriting, an activity associated with process approaches to teaching writing. Becker investigated clustering, a type of free-associative activity, among 424 adult learners of German at various levels in a Berlitz language school. All students wrote one composition on a topic that they selected from two prompt choices (leisure activities or a dream partner in a relationship). The students in the experimental group used clustering for 5 minutes before writing their compositions whereas students in the control group did not. Two raters were presented with pairs of compositions (one each from the control and experimental groups) and asked to identify which of each pair contained more imagery and interesting ideas. Both raters identified a higher percentage of experimental than control group compositions. No information was given concerning how the essays were paired for comparison, which makes these results difficult to interpret. In addition, on a measure of fluency, the novice subgroup of the experimental group significantly outperformed its counterparts in the control group.

Martinez-Gibson (1998) also investigated prewriting activities in FL writing. In a study of 43 fifth-semester university students of Spanish in a




Spanish composition class, students were divided into a "culture-discussion" group and a "non-culture discussion" group. Prior to viewing a Span- ish-language television commercial for a soft drink depicting both Spanish and U.S. culture, both groups participated in prewriting activities. They read and discussed a chapter in their text- book about comparison/contrast writing and then worked in small groups to write short comparison essays on topics such as attending a large versus a small university. They were then told that they would be viewing a commercial and would later be required to write an essay discussing cultural differences between the United States and Spain. After receiving this information, the culture discussion group participated in activities that included brainstorming about their knowledge of Spanish culture, categorizing these ideas, discussing stereotypes, and discussing their knowledge of the differences between Spanish and U.S. culture. In contrast, the other group was told to observe and identify any gestures, words, actions, or scenery in the commercial that were familiar or unfamiliar to them. After viewing the commercial, the culture-discussion group gener- ated and categorized a list of cultural differences depicted in the commercial. The two groups completed their essays; analysis and comparison of the writing indicated that the culture-discussion group outperformed the other group in terms of recognizing the cultural differences il- lustrated in the advertisement, task completion, and cohesiveness of writing (defined as including a thesis statement, a body that supports the thesis statement, connections between paragraphs, organization, and an appropriate introduction and conclusion). A weakness of this study is that the author did not indicate whether more than one reader analyzed the writing samples; furthermore, no information was given about how, given the many components included in the researcher's definition of "cohesiveness," the rater determined whether or not a writing sample was cohesive.

Two other studies, by Piasecki (1988) and Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992), investigated peer feedback, another activity commonly associated with process approaches to writing instruction. In Piasecki's study of 112 third-year high school students of Spanish, over an 8-week period, students wrote one essay per week based on picture cues. Students in the experimental group participated in peer editing of each other's work, which consisted of correcting each other's grammatical errors. Students in the control group received error correction from their teacher. Two

10-sentence essays, one written as a pretreatment test and one as a posttreatment test, were rated on a scale of 0 to 10; each sentence received up to one full point, one-half point for comprehensibility/appropriateness, and one-half point for form. Results indicated that both groups improved but that there was no significant difference between the gains of the two groups. In this study, as in several others, the overall quality of the essays was not measured. As in Nummikoski's (1991) study, coherence of discourse was not considered.

Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992) also investigated peer feedback in FL writing. In their study of 30 students in accelerated first-year college French, the participants wrote two essay assignments requiring three separate drafts. Students in the experimental group participated in peer review in small groups, reading their papers aloud to each other and receiving oral feedback from their peers. Students in the control group received written feedback from their teacher. Com- parison of the final drafts of the assignments indicated no significant difference between the two groups in performance in the areas of content, organization, vocabulary, grammar, or mechanics. Comparison of each of the two groups' change in performance from the first assignment to the second assignment indicated that the teacher-feedback group improved significantly on grammar but got significantly worse on content, organization, and vocabulary, whereas the peer-feedback group showed the exact opposite change: significant improvement in content, organization, and vocabulary, but significant weak- ening in grammar.

It is important to note that there are at least two distinct methodological approaches taken by the authors of these works about teaching process approaches to FL writing. Some researchers (Becker, 1991; Hedgcock & Lefkowitz, 1992; Martinez-Gibson, 1998) examined the writing produced as a result of a certain pedagogical pro- cedure (often, but not always, comparing this writing to the writing of a nontreatment control group). For example, Hedgcock and Lefkowitz compared student essays from two groups: students who received feedback on their essay drafts only from the teacher and students who received oral feedback from each other when they worked in peer groups. In contrast, other researchers (Gallego de Blibeche, 1993; Kern & Schultz, 1992; Piasecki, 1988) applied a treatment to students in an experimental group, often but not always providing a control group, and then compared writing samples taken near the beginning




and end of the treatment period, looking for change. For example, in Piasecki's study of peer revision, during the course of the term, students in the control group received feedback on their compositions only from their teacher, whereas students in the experimental group engaged in peer revision, as in Hedgcock and Lefkowitz's study. However, in Piasecki's study, the experimental and control groups provided an unrevised writing sample at the beginning and end of the term, and these two sets of writing samples, rather than the end products of the revision based on either peer revision or teacher-feedback, were compared.

In some cases, this pattern of contrasting research design seems to reflect a difference in the authors' approaches to research and in their phi- losophies of writing and writing instruction. For some, the use of pre- and posttreatment writing tests may indicate a desire for strict adherence to experimental research design; such an approach is in line with research design in the field of applied linguistics, a parent discipline of FL. But the differences in research design also seem to reflect contrasting beliefs about writing instruction. Although some authors consider only the writing students do without intervention when measuring writing ability, authors like Hedgcock and Lefkowitz (1992) deem analysis of the product of writing involving peer or teacher feedback a valid means of gauging students' writing ability. Their approach seems to reflect attitudes and research conventions within the fields of Li En- glish as well as ESL writing, in which revision based on others' input is considered a legitimate way for students to compose. In contrast, much of the research on FL writing process instruction seems to imply a mistrust of using peer or teacher feedback in writing that is assessed. (See Heilen- man, 1991, for a discussion of barriers to the adoption of the process approach to teaching writing in FL courses.) Research that analyzes only writing that students have completed without peer or teacher feedback seems to reveal a view of writing as a private, individual activity rather than as a socially situated enterprise (see, e.g., Porter, 1992). Perhaps the researchers in the field need to examine their assumptions about writing proficiency and even their conception of writing itself. (See Lee, 1994, and Reichelt, 1999, for more on this subject.) An alternative view of the situation is that in the field of FL, many of the researchers do not view writing in a FL as an end in itself, but rather as a means of overall L2 acquisition or as a support skill for other FL skills, such as oral production.

The research on the effects of explicit instruction in the writing process indicates that such instruction has positive effects on at least some aspects of students' written performance and that peer feedback on writing may be at least as effec- tive as teacher feedback. However, more high- quality research needs to be conducted in this area.

TEACHER FEEDBACK

In addition to studies that report on peer feedback in FL writing, other research, including that by Semke (1982, 1984), Kepner (1991), and Lalande (1982), focuses on teacher/expert feedback. Results point to the effectiveness of comments on the content of student writing but not on its linguistic accuracy. Semke investigated the effects of various types of feedback on students' weekly free writing. In her study of 141 third- quarter university students of German, the participants were divided into four different groups: Group one received comments about the content of their writing but no feedback on errors; group two received error correction only; group three received comments on content along with correction of their errors; and group four had their errors marked with a code and were asked to make corrections. Analysis of student pre- and posttreatment writing samples indicated no significant difference among the groups in terms of increase in accuracy; however, group one, the group that received comments on content only, wrote significantly longer essays than the other groups, and group four, the group that had its errors marked with a code and was asked to make corrections, scored the lowest of all groups on this same measure of fluency. No ratings of the overall quality of the essays were reported.

Like Semke, Kepner (1991) investigated the impact of different kinds of feedback on student writing. In this study of 60 intermediate-level college learners of Spanish, students wrote eight guided journal entries over the course of the term, receiving either error correction with explanation or message-related comments written in Spanish. The sixth journal entry was analyzed for the number of higher-level propositions (including analysis, comparison/contrast, infer- ence/interpretation, and evaluation) as well as for the number of surface-level errors in grammar, vocabulary, and syntax. The group receiving message-related comments produced a significantly greater number of higher-level propositions than the error-correction group, and the two groups did not vary in the number of errors




produced. The results of this research are some- what difficult to interpret, given the fact that the study did not include a sample of pretreatment writing.

Lalande (1982) also investigated the effects of various types of feedback on student writing. In his study, the participants, 60 intermediate-level college students of German, attended sections of a course that focused on reviewing grammar in- tensively and reading short stories in German. Over the course of three essays, students in the control group had all their grammatical and orthographic errors corrected; in contrast, the experimental group's errors were marked with a code indicating error type, and the students were required to interpret the code, correct their errors, and rewrite the essays. The experimental group students also monitored the frequency and recurrence of their errors with an error awareness sheet. Pre- and posttreatment writing samples were analyzed; as in Semke's (1982, 1984) study, no rating of the quality of the essays' content was reported. Error analysis of the essays indicated that the number of errors in the control group's writing increased while the number of errors for the experimental error-coding/monitoring group's writing remained steady, except for a decrease in orthographic errors.

Lalande (1982) suggested that the experimental treatment seems to have had a steadying effect on the incidence of errors as students attempted increasingly more difficult structures as their in- terlanguage developed. Although this explanation is plausible, no analysis of changes in the complexity of the students' writing was undertaken to provide evidence for such a claim. In- deed, in light of the fact that the students in Semke's (1982, 1984) research who received no comments on their errors made linguistic progress in their writing (in fact, more progress than any of the other groups), an equally plausible claim presents itself. As Truscott (1996) argued in critiquing this study, the error correction given to both groups in Lalande's study may have had a harmful effect on the students' linguistic progress in writing. Perhaps for the students in the experimental group, the process of working directly with their own errors, revising and correcting their coded errors or using the error awareness sheet, or both, served as partial compensation for any detrimental effects of error correction. Unfortu- nately, Lalande's study did not include a control group that received no feedback at all on grammar errors. Comparison of the writing of such a group with the writing of the other two treatment groups in this study would have provided more

information about the relative advantages and dis- advantages of various types of attention to linguistic form.

The results of this handful of studies regarding teacher feedback suggest that students may benefit from receiving comments regarding the content of their essays. The research also suggests that marking of errors may have no positive effect on students' writing. (For further discussion of error correction, see Truscott, 1996, who reviewed the literature on FL and ESL writing error correction and argued for abandonment of error correction in L2 writing; see also Ferris, 1999, who responded to Truscott's proposal, and Truscott's 1999 counterresponse.)

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

At this point, researchers interested in FL writing have identified and begun to investigate the following issues of interest, which deserve further attention.

1. The effects of various types of grammar treatments on FL writing, including explicit grammar instruction, correction of errors, indication of error location, and sentence combining activities

2. The effects of various types of computer use, including grammar drill, e-mail and other interactive writing, and word processing

3. The influence of task types, including computer-mediated writing, interactive writing, teacher-assigned writing, and writing in various modes such as description, narration, argument, and comparison/contrast

4. The effects of extensive reading, writing, or both

5. The effects of strategy training, including metacognitive and cognitive strategy training

6. The influence of process instruction, including elements such as planning, writing of multiple drafts, peer feedback, and revision

7. The impact of various types of feedback, including content-focused comments, error feedback, and peer feedback

Because much of the already completed work in the field exhibits serious design flaws, future FL writing investigators researching these areas should learn from its shortcomings, working toward research that is conducted according to sound principles of design. They should keep in mind the following principles in their undertak- ings. First, it is crucial that all FL writing researchers familiarize themselves with the body of published research on FL writing so that a conversation can develop regarding issues of concern




in the field. Often, researchers appear to be un- aware of previously published work. Authors should contextualize their own work within the body of work already published and should describe how the research questions they investigate are related to it. Second, researchers should provide adequate descriptions of their research procedures in order to open their methods not only to evaluation and critique but to replication. Third, researchers should avoid the design problems common to much of the existing research, including the lack of a control group, the lack of needed tests of statistical significance, the lack of reliable measurement procedures, and the pres- ence of too many variables. Finally, researchers should exercise caution in interpreting their results and avoid offering explanations of their findings that are not in line with their data.

It is also important for researchers to consider some broader questions, ones raised throughout this review of work on FL writing. As indicated earlier, the issue of the purpose of writing within the FL curriculum needs to be explored. Such exploration would be useful not only for FL writing researchers who must make decisions about how to assess student writing in their studies, but also for FL writing classroom instructors. One part of this exploration could include a needs analysis for writing in a FL. For example, if the purposes include providing further experience in writing in the TL appropriate for some particular audience and purpose, then more than measures of grammatical accuracy, fluency, syntactic complexity, and vocabulary use should be considered in classroom instruction and in assessment of student writing. Additionally, if using writing to learn about the literature or culture of the TL is a purpose for writing, then the accuracy and level of analysis of content should be considered in classroom instruction and in researchers' analysis of student writing samples. (For a discussion of the notion of "writing to learn," see McLeod, 1992, and Zinsser, 1988.) Investigation of what roles writing might play in acquisition of other TL skills is another issue that might be included in discussion of the purpose of FL writing.

The growing number of researchers interested in FL writing indicates that the area has the potential to develop into a cohesive field with a more clearly focused body of research and a group of industrious, enthusiastic researchers. If the area of FL writing is to develop beyond its current state, however, it is crucial that more well- designed research be undertaken on the effects of grammar treatments, computer use, task types, extensive reading and writing, strategy training,

process instruction, and feedback. Additionally, critical reflection must go on concerning the purpose(s) of FL writing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The author would like to thank the anonymous re- viewers of this article for their insightful and very helpful comments on various drafts of this manuscript.

NOTES

1 The sources reported on here were found in a search of the Modern Language Association (MLA) bibliography, the Linguistics and Language Behavior Ab- stracts (LLBA), the ERIC index, Worldcat, Dissertation Abstracts International (DAI), and the bibliographies of scholarship in second language writing that appear in each issue of the Journal of Second Language Writing, as well as in other bibliographies encountered, either sepa- rately (Homstad & Thorson, 1994; Polio, Mosele, Danek, & Ording, n.d.) or at the end of other works about FL writing. The Appendix presents a summary of these works and their findings, in the order in which they are presented in this article. Because most of the works on FL writing have appeared within the last 3 decades, these are the sources reported on here. Every effort was made to include all works about FL writing in the United States published within this time frame; any omissions are regretted and may be due to the fact that a given work was not indexed at the time this research was undertaken. The works chosen for discussion are all works on FL writing that involve collection of quantita- tive or qualitative data, or both, and that focus explicitly on composition in a FL. Works that deal only tangen- tially with composition or that focus on only the word, phrase, or sentence level have been excluded. Addition- ally, the reports of results focus on the effects of a given pedagogical treatment or task type on students' texts, even though some studies also investigate other areas, such as student attitudes towards various pedagogical procedures. Because the amount of research in the area of FL writing is relatively small, no studies were excluded from this review based on quality; it is hoped that even flawed research can point to important issues for investigation and can help shape further research and that the flaws themselves can be noted and avoided in the future.

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APPENDIX Foreign Language Writing Studies

Author/Year FL Research Design Focus Participants Comments Claims

Frantzen, 1995 44 students two-group comparison both groups improved on several 5th-semester grammar areas; no significant

Spanish university no real control group; overall advantage for either group same topic used for pre-

daily grammar and posttreatment writing review, correction samples; overall quality of of composition errors writing not measured

Manley & Calk, 1997 14 students one group, pretest/posttest improvement on targeted advanced level grammar areas; no increase on

French university problems with rater training holistic scores of quality and reliability; no control

error-targeted group grammar instruction

Cooper & Morain, 120 students two-group comparison increased syntactic complexity 1980 3rd-quarter

university overall quality of writing not French measured

sentence-combining

Cooper, 1981 325 students two-group comparison increased syntactic complexity 3rd-quarter

French, German, university overall quality of writing not Spanish measured

sentence combining

Herrmann, 1990 24 students two-group comparison no significant gains or losses in 1st-year either group's writing proficiency

French university same topics used for pre- and posttreatment writing samples;

use of computer for writing samples gathered under drill work vs. noncontrolled conditions collaborative writing

Leh, 1997 35 students two-group comparison no significant difference in 5th-semester improvement in either group's

Spanish university treatment not uniform essay scores among experimental group

email vs. non-email use members

McGuire, 1997 27 students two-group comparison no significant gains or losses in 4th-semester either group's writing proficiency

Spanish university treatment not uniform among experimental group

use of MundoHispano members; no real control vs. supplementary group writing activities





Ittzes, 1997 40 students text analysis/comparison computer conference writing intermediate received higher ratings in

German level several areas university strong research design

computer conference writing vs. traditional journaling

Florez-Estrada, 1995 28 students 3rd- text analysis/comparison email group spent more time year university writing and outperformed other

Spanish group on several measures students in computer group

email writing vs. spent more time writing than traditional students in traditional journaling journaling control group

Trenchs, 1996 3 students qualitative writing quality correlated with 6th-grade writing behaviors and linguistic

Spanish nonexperimental study skill

use of email

Nirenberg, 1989 57 students two-group comparison among advanced students, word beginning & processing students increased

Spanish advanced problematic essay prompts; fluency more than other group university overall quality of writing not

word processing measured vs. longhand

Martinez-Lage 23 students text analysis/comparison dialogue journal writing was gen- 1992 2nd-year erally more syntactically complex

university overall quality of writing and grammatically accurate than Spanish not measured teacher-assigned compositions

traditional teacher- assigned journals vs. dialogue journals

Koda, 1993 25 students 1st- text analysis/comparison no significant linguistic differences and 2nd-year between text types; rhetorical

Japanese university strong research design differences found

descriptive vs. narrative tasks

Paulson, 1993 89 learners inter- text analysis/comparison students who completed task mediate level focusing on explaining outper-

Spanish university strong research design formed students who completed other task types

various task types





McKee, 1980 182 students 2nd- text analysis/comparison no significant difference in and 3rd-quarter fluency; when students wrote as

French university overall quality of writing not themselves, writing was syntactically measured more complex

remaining self vs. taking on another's role in writing

Chavez, 1996 37 students text analysis/comparison revised writing contained more 3rd-semester morphological but fewer

German university writing tasks used were not syntactic errors typical of classroom writing

revised vs. non- tasks; overall quality of writing revised writing tasks not measured

Chastain, 1990 14 students text analysiscomparison essays written for a grade were 300-level longer and contained longer,

Spanish university different writing task-types more complex sentences used for pre- and post-

graded vs. treatment samples ungraded writing

Baudrand-Aertker, 21 students one group, pretest posttest writers' increased scores of 1992 3rd-year high holistic writing proficiency

school same topic used for pre- and French posttreatment writing samples

dialogue journals

Uhlir, 1995 6 students 1st- one group, pretest, posttest, students increased fluency and year 8th-grade and two-group comparison question use

Spanish comparison group inadequately

daily expressive described; no tests of statistical writing significance

Nummikoski, 1991 127 students three-group comparison no overall significant difference 1st-year university among groups; among high

Russian pre- and posttreatment achievers, interactive writing samples gathered in 5- and group outperformed reading

reading only vs. 10-minute sessions, group on fluency increase writing only vs. respectively; samples not interactive writing required to exhibit global

coherence

Caruso, 1994 177 students two-group comparison neither treatment had an effect 4th-semester on syntactic complexity of

Spanish university no real control group; students' writing overall quality of writing

effect of reading not measured vs. speaking and writing





Aziz, 1995 72 students two-group comparison cognitive/metacognitive group 2nd-semester outperformed cognitive group

French university strong research design on improvement in grammatical agreement

cognitive vs. cog- and overall writing proficiency nitive/metacognitive strategy training

Klohs, 1994 72 students two-group comparison mnemonic group improved 2nd-year high significantly more than

French school overall quality of control group on ability writing not measured to differentiate two past-tense

mnemonic strategy verb forms in their writing training

Gallego de Blibeche, 36 students two-group comparison explicit instruction group 1993 elementary outperformed control group on

school strong research design length and organization Spanish

explicit instruction in composition process

Kern & Schultz, 73 students one group, pretest-posttest students made improvement over 1992 3rd and 4th- the year

year university no control group French

explicit instruction in composition process

Becker, 1991 424 adult two-group comparison prewriting group outperformed learners control group on amount

German various levels incomplete information of imagery and interesting ideas Berlitz concerning essay rating

prewriting language school

Martinez-Gibson, 43 students two-group comparison prewriting group outperformed 1998 5th-semester control group in recognizing

university no information concerning cultural differences and in Spanish number of essay raters or cohesiveness

interrater reliability prewriting (cultural discussion)





Piasecki, 1988 112 students two-group comparison no significant differences in 3rd-year writing of peer vs. teacher high school overall quality of writing not feedback groups

Spanish measured

peer vs. teacher feedback

Hedgcock & 30 students two-group comparison teacher feedback group Lefkowitz, accelerated improved on grammar but worsened 1992 1st-year strong research design on content, organization, &

university vocabulary; peer feedback French group showed exact

opposite change peer vs. teacher feedback

Semke, 141 students two-group comparison no significant difference 1982, 1984 3rd-quarter among groups' grammatical

university overall quality of writing not accuracy; content-only feedback German measured group improved fluency most,

while group asked to correct own various types errors decreased most in fluency of teacher feedback

Kepner, 1991 60 students two-group comparison group receiving message-related intermediate comments produced more higher- level no pretreatment writing level propositions; no between-

Spanish university sample taken group differences in amount of errors

teacher feedback: error correction vs. message- related feedback

Lalande, 1982 60 students two-group comparison error correction group's intermediate errors increased; error coding level overall quality of writing not group's number of errors

German university measured; no real control remained steady group

teacher feedback: error correction vs. coding of errors



a critical review of writing in a fl and pedagogy approaches

Documents