Task Response and Text Construction across L1 and L2 Writing : Japanese Overseas High School Returnees

Ways that writers approach writing tasks and construct texts can be affected by a variety of factors such as social, cultural, and contextual factors, including previous writing experience and instruction. In responses to a picture elicitation task, for example, Watanabe (2004) found that Japanese children writing in their first language tended to organize information in a real time sequence of events, whereas North American children frequently reorganized the given information in a cause/effect relationship in their English writing. While this finding suggests that students with different social and cultural backgrounds tend to respond to given writing tasks differently, Watanabe maintains that this difference in discourse types, one for narrative and the other for expository, reflects the kinds of first language (L1) literacy training that these children have received in their home countries. As observed in Watanabe (2004), writers’ task response and text construction can be closely related to past writing experience, which students usually obtain through instruction and training. The influence of such factors, particularly L1 writing experience, on L2 writing has been observed in a number of studies (Cumming, 1989; Hirose, 2003; Kobayashi & Rinnert, 2004, 2008; Kubota, 1998; Sasaki & Hirose, 1996). Among them, Cumming (1989), for example, investigated the L2 (English) writing by French-speaking college students and found that writing expertise was a strong factor affecting the quality of their written texts and their use of composing strategies. In particular, those with professional L1 writing experience produced L2 essays with effective discourse organization and highly developed content, using problem-solving strategies and attending to complex aspects of writing. Similarly, Kobayashi and Rinnert (2004, 2008) found that L1 high school writing training/experience affected Japanese novice writers’ choice of discourse types and text construction (see Previous Study in section 1.2 below). In particular, those who had received intensive L1 training tended to use a clear 3part (introduction body conclusion) structure and include frequent use of discourse markers such as first, secondly, and on the other hand, in their L2 essays. In contrast, there have been a few studies that have examined the reverse effect of L2 writing experience on L1 (Berman, 1994; Shi, 2003). Berman (1994), for example, found that high school students (N = 126) who were taught rhetorical features of persuasive writing in either their L1 (Icelandic) or L2 (English) applied that knowledge across languages. The transfer of the knowledge was found to occur more frequently from their L2 to their L1 than the reverse,1 because they did not have any language limitation when writing in their first language. On the other hand, L2 language 11