TEXT PLANNING AND REVISION IN SECONDARY EDUCATION. AN ANALYSIS OF A COLLABORATIVE WRITING TASK

Abstract

Text planning and revision in L1 writing have been analysed mainly from a psychological perspective, on the basis of data coming from think-aloud protocols, interviews and questionnaires. There are not yet many studies on L1 writing which analyse these processes from the perspective of applied linguistics in a natural classroom context such as a collaborative writing task. The present study aims to investigate, first, whether students participating in a collaborative writing task in Spanish (L1) carry out the pre-planning and final revision processes and how much time they devote to them, and, second, which operations characteristic of these processes they focus on at each moment of the task. Participants were 30 15-16-year-old students in the fourth year of ESO (secondary compulsory education). For this investigation, students’ oral interactions and the time devoted to each process were recorded, and a qualitative analysis as well as a quantification of the different episodes were performed. Results show that students plan before writing, but only revise during, and not after, writing. Also, it is observed that content generation is predominant, and that, when revising, students evaluate and correct both mechanical and global aspects. Results evidence the need to insist on setting goals and organizing ideas during pre-planning, and to encourage final revision.