A pilot study was conducted in which 6 students with L1 German had to produce a German version of a text they had composed in their L2 English. The goals were to explore (a) in what respects the ability of advanced university English students to express themselves in their L2 English differs from their ability to do so in their L1 German, and (b) for which aspects of writing the implementation of translation exercises is useful as a tool to improve writing skills. The methods of data collection used were think-aloud and keystroke logging. In the analysis, special emphasis was placed on text-level errors as opposed to formal, lexical and grammatical errors. In their L1 versions, students were consistently able to avoid errors of implicitness and sense but displayed no improvements in other areas such as text coherence and functional sentence perspective. Though some of the errors could be attributed to the special requirements of the translation assignment, translation was also found to have certain advantages that make it a useful tool in writing didactics.1. For a German version of this article, see Göpferich & Nelezen (2013
Background, literature review and research questionsAt Justus Liebig University (Giessen, Germany), as well as at many other universities, students pursuing degrees in the fields of English literature, culture and linguistics are generally required to write their term papers and final theses in English. These students are thereby immediately confronted with two concurrent challenges: the challenge of writing 'academically', which requires the students to adapt to a specific form of discourse with which they are not yet familiar, neither in their native language (L1) nor their foreign language (L2) English; and the very challenge of first having to do this in their L2. It is well known that writing, even in one' s mother tongue, is a highly complex process. Therefore, writing assignments devised to foster writing competence are frequently subdivided into sub-tasks of lower complexity. Against this background, the question arises as to whether the requirement of writing academic texts in the L2, before having mastered this skill in the L1, leads to such an increase in task complexity that it overburdens students, which could have consequences reaching beyond the poorer linguistic quality that L2 compositions inevitably display: Having students write term papers in their L2 may further result in a less profound analysis of the subject matter, not to mention a less profound treatment of the L2 literature associated with the subject matter. These potential consequences of requiring students to write academic texts in their L2 are, in turn, detrimental to the epistemic function of writing.The few studies conducted to date which have compared L1 and L2 text production have indicated that-aside from the additional lexical and grammatical challenges associated with foreign language production in general-L2 text production processes are strikingly similar to L1 text production processes. As...
