The effect of communicative purpose and reading medium on pauses during different phases of the textualization process

Abstract

Multiple factors simultaneously interact during the writing process. The effect of these interacting factors must be considered if writing is studied as a dynamic and complex process that constantly changes. Based on that premise, the study aims to determine how the interaction between the reading medium and the communicative purpose of a writing task affects the pauses during different stages of the writing process. At the same time, it seeks to determine how this interaction is related to the writer's competence. Using a 2-by-2 experimental design, undergraduate students (n = 66) read documents (print or digital format) and completed a computer-embedded writing task with different communicative purposes (to persuade or to inform). While writing, pauses-related keystrokes were recorded. The results show that neither the reading medium nor the task purpose or the interaction of these two variables affect pauses. However, communicative purpose interacts with the stages of the writing process, so regardless of participants' writing competence, they took longer at the end of the writing process when the purpose was to persuade. Other interactions indicated that the type of pause interacts differentially with the stage and communicative purpose. These interactions and main effects were systematically related to the writer's competence; because once it was statistically controlled, these interactions and main effects were no longer significant. The results are analysed in terms of the cognitive processes underlying pauses, considering evidence from studies on hybrid reading-writing and integrated writing studies.

Introduction to the special issue on synthesis tasks: where reading and writing meet

“…The study of Valenzuela and Castillo (2022) confirms the findings of previous studies that it is important to take into account timing or different phases when studying the writing process. Breetvelt et al (1994) and Rijlaarsdam and Van den Bergh (1996) showed that the moment at which certain actions occur and their variation across the writing process are essential when describing writing processes and their relation to the product (text quality).…”

“…Three studies in this special issue investigate reading and writing processes of synthesis texts, sometimes in combination with different task types and learner groups. The studies deal with secondary school students (Barzilai et al, 2021) and university students (Castells et al, 2022;Valenzuela & Castillo, 2022). Barzilai et al (2021) and Castells et al (2022) start from a writing-to-learn perspective, that is, they investigate how writing can support content learning (from sources) or reading comprehension of source texts.…”

“…Hence, note-taking, when done, served mainly to copy source information. Valenzuela and Castillo (2022) studied pausing behavior during source-based writing processes. The study had a 2*2 factorial design.…”

“…Whether factors like task and learner affect source-based writing, is addressed in the studies by Castells et al (2022) and Valenzuela and Castillo (2022).…”

It's not just a phase: Investigating text simplification in a second language from a process and product perspective

“…In our study, for instance, longer between-word and between-sentence pauses might indicate that the students gave more careful consideration to issues of sentence structure and vocabulary in the first phase of text simplification (Leijten et al, 2019a ). In contrast, the second phase was shorter and characterized by less frequent pauses, but with an overall longer average pause time, which seems to indicate that the students were mainly making limited revisions based on longer episodes of re-reading and re-checking their drafts, as was also observed in other studies (Perrin and Wildi, 2008 ; Xu and Xia, 2021 ; Valenzuela and Castillo, 2022 ).…”