Can low proficiency level learners produce diverse texts? A multidimensional approach to Czech as a foreign language
Abstract
Many recent studies (Biber et al., 2016; Friginal & Weigle, 2014; Staples et al., 2018; Weigle & Friginal, 2015) predominantly focus on the writing of advanced learners. Written production of beginners is mostly analysed in comparison with those from other proficiency levels (Kim & Nam, 2019). However, particular attention has not been paid to text variability in low-level written production. This study thus attempts to analyse functional variability within texts of Polish learners of Czech at level A2 (basic users).
Using the Czech model of multidimensional analysis (Cvrček et al., 2018), learner texts (62 texts from 16 students) were projected onto a multidimensional space to identify their variability. The texts were divided into 4 tasks including: an informal letter, a description of a place, an argumentative essay, and a story. The results indicate that the writing of beginner learners reveals differences between the tasks, which underlines the usefulness of the tasks in the comparison of L2 writing; letters are characterised by lowest cohesion and the highest amount of addressing coding, descriptions of place are spontaneous and polythematic, argumentative essays are the most cohesive, with the lowest amount of addressee coding among all tasks, and stories describe the most concrete, particular information and are highly progressive. Moreover, within-task variability showed that argumentative essays have the lowest degree of variation, as they are more convention-based than stories, which have the highest degree of variation. Comparison with the target Czech registers showed that non-native argumentative essays are close to native argumentation; however, they differ in their use of verbal phrases that are more frequent in learner writing. Storytelling, however, represents a task that has no close counterpart in the native Czech data. The vaguest, in terms of Czech register, are informal letters and place descriptions.
References:
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