Computer-Aided Writing in French as a Foreign Language: A Qualitative and Quantitative Look at

Currently little documentation exists on the writing strategies and habits of foreign language (FL) writers. This study was designed to observe, as unobtrusively as possible, the revision strategies of 5 students of French enrolled in a 1-semester intensive intermediate college French course. The participants completed a two-part writing task with the aid of the software program Systeme-D (Noblitt, Sola, & Pet, 1987, 1992). Of considerable interest is the program’s keystroke tracking device, which records the lexical, grammatical, and thematic information that students access while writing. Analysis of the compositions, computer records, videotapes of writing sessions, and student responses to postwriting questionnaires provide a detailed picture of how and when the students revised in real time—with minimal impact on the writing process itself. Results showed that both the self-reported good writers and poor writers engaged in the process of revising and that, as expected, surface-level changes far outnumbered the changes to content. These findings suggest that linguistic concerns and lack of explicit instruction on revision and computer strategies impede the reviewing and reworking of texts.