English is current leading writing language worldwide. Understanding how learners of English as a second and foreign language (ESL, EFL) develop their writing skills is an important area of academic and research interest. Most inquiries in this field have studied the writing of groups of ESL learners from a quantitative perspective, focused on linguistic aspects in one-time texts. Therefore, there is need for studies that counterbalance this predominant trend: studies in EFL (Manchón & Haan, 2008; Ortega, 2004); adopting a more comprehensive perspective (Gaddis, 2002; Sasaki, 2012) or organic way (Norris & Ortega, 2009, 2010; Dörnyei, 2009; Verspoor, Schmid, & Xu, 2012), considering individual variation (Larsen-Freeman 2006, 2009, 2012; Ortega, 2012b; Williams, 2012; Ferris, 2013) and developmental processes (Baba & Nitta, 2014; Murakami, 2016) with longitudinal and multi-methods designs (Belcher, 2012, 2013).
This presentation will report on a) the design of a mixed-method ongoing PhD research on how EFL learners at a Colombian undergraduate education program (BEdFLUC) develop their EFL writing and b) preliminary results of this research. The study aims at investigating differences, writing issues, influencing factors, and developmental profiles of some learners in the three curricular stages of the BEdFLUC. Using an analytic rubric, data from a one-time writing task were analyzed quantitatively, altogether with the students’ perception of writing, issues, and influencing factors by means of a questionnaire. The qualitative analysis follows the development of the EFL writing skills of six students, (two per each of the three curricular stages of the BEdFLUC), over 16 weeks (longitudinal multi-case study) with data from a series of six writing tasks, immediate post-writing retrospective interviews, a learner’s journal, and semi-structured interviews.
In the frame of a socio-cognitive perspective, the presentation will share preliminary findings about particular differences and influential factors in the development of the EFL writing skills as well as individual developmental patterns that cannot be seen in quantitative cross-sectional studies dealing with groups and considering individual variation as deviation. These findings might be of pedagogical interest for EFL curricular situations, while contributing to EFL writing studies, a still consolidating area in second language acquisition (SLA) research.
