Cross-Linguistic Transfer of Writing Strategies. Karen Forbes
they overwhelmingly expressed a preference for creative writing tasks over essays or ‘set tasks’. Reasons given for this included being able to ‘use your imagination’ (Ben) or enjoying ‘thinking of a story and just writing it out’ (Aleksandra) and also a preference for tasks based on personal experiences or opinions because there is less chance of ‘getting it wrong’ (Zoe). However, while the ability to express creative ideas freely in English seemed to lead to enjoyment of writing, conversely students’ limited language ability in the FLs seemed to act as a barrier to enjoyment. They expressed frustration that ‘you haven’t got the ability to do, to write up your experiences cause you don’t know how to say everything’ (Chris) and that ‘you can’t describe as much and it gets a bit boring because you’re repeating over and over again’ (Aleksandra). Yet, even though some students did not enjoy writing in an FL due to a lack of proficiency, others reported feeling a sense of achievement when they completed a writing task, which they did not express in relation to English where they perhaps took it for granted. This was particularly evident among higher achieving learners who seemed to enjoy the challenge: ‘I like, when you’re writing in French or German, when you’ve written it all and seen how much you can actually do and like, that you are actually OK with this language’ (Carissa).
‘Thinking’ in L1 and FL writing
Perhaps the most interesting theme that emerged from the interviews in relation to writing in L1 and an FL was students’ awareness of the need to think more when writing in an FL. Table 2.1 provides an overview of some of the students’ comments in relation to both language contexts.
Table 2.1 Comments about ‘thinking’ in the FL and L1 classroom
| Foreign languages | English |
| ‘In French you normally have to keep thinking what you need to write and how to spell it and things’ | ‘I can just write more naturally’ |
| ‘I think like, when you’re doing French and German you’re thinking more about the, like, the words’ | ‘You don’t have to think about it as much, cause like, you already know it’ |
| ‘In German I concentrate and I make sure that it makes sense’ | ‘In English I don’t really have to think about it cause I’ve been doing it for like, 10 years’ |
| ‘In German like, I don’t know the whole language so I have to like … think about it more than I do in English’ | ‘That’s your born language so you know all the words’ |
| ‘I use more adjectives […] than I do in English … because I’m thinking more about it’ | ‘I don’t need to think about it as long as I do with French or German’ |
There is an obvious link to be made here to the ‘native-speaker’ factor discussed above; however, it is important to recognise that even though these students perceived themselves as thinking less when writing in English, this was not necessarily the case. It may be that, due to their experience and level of proficiency in English, their thought processes had become proceduralised to the extent that they were no longer consciously aware that they were taking place. Therefore, this does not mean that they were not thinking in English, but rather that they were more conscious and metacognitively aware of their thought processes in the FL classroom. Yet, such comments provide some evidence to support the hypothesis that the FL classroom, where students are undoubtedly more aware of being engaged in thinking, is perhaps more conducive to the development of language-related metacognitive strategies than the L1 classroom (Forbes, 2018).
Students’ views on what is important when writing in L1 and FL
Another useful indicator of students’ conceptualisations of writing across different languages is what they consider to be the most important features. Forty-five Year 9 students were asked to complete a questionnaire which aimed to establish and track their view of writing in each subject (English, German and French). Using a Likert scale, students were asked to rate the importance of a range of criteria; some of these related to general features of writing, such as thinking of creative and interesting ideas, organising and structuring a text and overall accuracy, while others related to aspects of the writing process such as planning your work and revising/editing your work. General trends were then further explored within the individual interviews.
The first notable finding to emerge from the questionnaire data was that there were no significant differences between any of the importance ratings in German and French (following a series of Wilcoxon signed rank tests), which highlights the similarity in the ways in which students conceptualised writing in the two FLs. When comparing the FLs with English, however, the mean importance ratings for almost all of the criteria were higher in English, and this difference was significant in relation to five items: thinking of creative and interesting ideas, developing ideas, punctuation, fluency and overall accuracy. The fact that criteria such as thinking of creative ideas and developing ideas were rated as considerably more important in English can perhaps be explained by the differing task types as outlined above; given that tasks in English were seen to require more creativity and imagination, it seems logical that the expression of ideas would be considered more important than in German or French. It is perhaps more surprising that students considered overall accuracy to be more important in English, especially considering that they seemed to view writing in German and French as more about correct sentence construction. All in all, such views expressed on the questionnaires align with those expressed by some students in the interviews that English, as one of the ‘core’ subjects, is ‘an important subject’ (Chris), and by implication, more important than FLs.
In terms of the writing process, it is also worth noting that planning and revising/editing generally had the lowest ratings across each of the languages, although both were considered as slightly more important in English than in the two FLs. This also emerged in the interviews, where several students commented that, although they may engage in some planning in English, they did not feel it was as important in German or French because ‘when it’s like, the [foreign] languages I’m more focused on like, the words and stuff rather than like, the plot’ (Carissa), or because ‘you just find like, the words you wanna write and you write it down, you just go, you just do it as you go along really’ (Annie). While some students expressed that they did not feel that planning was important in English because, for example, they were able to ‘just write it down without having to plan it’ (Katarina), on the whole they were more likely to feel that planning in English could be beneficial because of the longer length of tasks. However, one student, Mei, added the caveat that the importance of planning in English depended on what the task was and that it would be more important for something like an essay or newspaper report than for a creative story.
In relation to revising/editing, on the whole, students in the interviews agreed that this was generally quite important. Such comments, however, predominantly referred to correcting superficial errors rather than making any substantial revisions or editing content. One girl, for example, commented that she felt it was important to check her German writing for ‘silly mistakes’ (Katarina), while one of her peers similarly stated: ‘I don’t think like, there’s any point in really just keep going through it and looking for like, really big mistakes. I just look like, for the little correction, like spelling mistakes I need to correct and stuff like that’ (Claire). The views expressed here by the students very much align with the claims made above by Grenfell and Harris (2017) and Kecskes and Papp (2000) that the approach to writing in the FL classroom tends to be bottom-up, while in the English classroom the approach tends to be more top-down.
Students’ approaches to writing in L1 and FL
While the data presented above provide an insight into students’ views on writing, more objective data were also collected to explore their actual writing process and the strategies they use. While this will be discussed fully in Chapter 6, it is worth briefly summarising the key points from the analysis which suggest that they did indeed approach writing differently in English and the FLs at the beginning of the study:
•Students were much more likely to engage in any form of planning in English than in German or French, to produce much longer plans and to use a wider range of planning strategies. While a common approach in English