Innovation in Language Learning

In this paper, we present the results of an intervention study on process-oriented writing of eighteen students in a Swedish upper secondary school (equivalent to CEFR level B1) in German as a foreign language. Firstly, we focus on students’ mind maps as a part of the process-oriented teaching approach. The content generated during planning serves as a writing plan in the writing process, which accompanies the text production (Hayes & Flower, 1980) [1]. “Planning strategies – implemented before writing to support the planning process – seem to be particularly beneficial for beginning and developing writers” (Limpo & Alves, 2018: 97) [2]. Our concern is to find out, how the use of mind maps is reflected in the texts and how this has influenced text length and text design (correlation between the number of categories (18) in the mind maps and text content, correlation between the number of categories and text length). Secondly, we examine syntactic complexity in the different text productions, to find out to what extent syntactic complexity and text length correlate. A strong correlation was found between the categories in the mind maps and the texts, when excluding the two categories “own narrative” and “comments”. These two categories dominated in the text productions. Contrary to results in earlier research, no correlations were found between text length and measures for syntactic complexity. Finally, we contribute with implications concerning writing activities in the foreign language classroom.

Keywords: Syntactic complexity, written production in L3 German, mind maps, text content, text length

References:

[1] Hayes, John R.; Flower, Linda (1980) Identifying the organization of writing processes. In: Lee W. Gregg; Erwin R. Steinberg (ed.) Cognitive processes in writing. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 3–29.

[2] Limpo, Teresa; Alves, Rui. A. (2018) Effects of planning strategies on writing dynamics and final texts. In: Acta Psychologica, 188, 97–109.