engleski

EFL Learners and Their Text Production Ability

The poster presents a study whose aim was to look into L2 language competence of Croatian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners, focused on their writing skills, although it should be noted that the present study was carried out as part of a large investigation into the multi-competence of the above stated group of learners. During their regular English (a compulsory school subject) class, the participants (eighth graders in the final primary school year) were administered a paper-and-pencil task to describe pictures identifying the ten differences between the two seemingly identical family situations in them. For the analysis of collected data, three separate assessment scales were constructed along the following criteria: task achievement (how much descriptions are relevant to pictures), vocabulary (how much scale or choice of vocabulary is appropriate to task), grammar/accuracy (how much descriptions are comprehensible in terms of grammar or spelling mistakes) and text cohesion (how descriptions are organised and what types of sentences are comprised in them). Each scale had four bands. The assessors (3) were trained. A comparison of the obtained scores on the writing task showed that our participants were successful at all levels but not quite equally as they scored highest on task achievement and lowest on grammar/accuracy. The correlation coeficients between the assessors were also computed, showing a high degree of their agreement (0.73-0.94). Generally speaking, the study pointed out the importance of linguistic knowledge (covering not just grammar and spelling but also lexis) in the productive process of writing but it also emphasised the way in which to organise the available data to fit into a meaningful discourse as one of the fundamental principles of any text structure. The learner, confronted with such a writing task, is thus faced with higher-order strategies such as planning and organisation but he/she is still supposed to pay attention to lower-order strategies, spelling rules or selection of appropriate lexical items being some of them. The situation becomes even more complicated if his/her general L2 competence is not at a required level. This poster should contribute to views on writing, primarily seen as strategic text production, in a foreign language as this skill is somewhat neglected in its acquisition. Namely, there is a general belief that it is not so easy to set a writing task to learners in accordance with their motivation to write, their personal interests in a given topic or their non-native language competence. On the other hand, it is not always simple to construct the objective assessment/evaluation criteria, so the entire approach to this linguistic skill in everyday L2 acquisition is far from being highly encouraging, productive and interactive from learner's point of view.

EFL learners; writing skill; text production

nije evidentirano