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L2 Writing as a Scaffold for L2 Speaking Grammatical Accuracy in a Text- Reconstruction Task

Sletova, Natalia
http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1681209241796278

Abstract Details

2023, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.
“How can teachers help students improve their second language (L2) speaking accuracy?” This is a question that most L2 educators ask themselves every day. Although L2 writing is a popular topic among Second Language Acquisition (SLA) researchers, the consideration that L2 writing has the potential to act as a scaffold for L2 speaking accuracy has often been overlooked. This research attempts to draw SLA researchers’ attention to the untapped potential that L2 writing has on improving L2 speaking accuracy. This research provides empirical evidence that L2 writing have a great potential to improve accuracy of L2 oral discourse. Twenty-three Novice, twenty-one Intermediate, and twenty Advanced university students of Russian participated in the study. They completed a text reconstruction task by working with the original text to 'notice the gap' using both written and spoken modes of recall. Both written and spoken forms of recall provided sufficient opportunity for improving semantic accuracy and produced textual complexity, and for acquiring new vocabulary with all three levels of learners. However, only the Novice, Intermediate, and Advanced learners working with the texts in writing showed improvement in their speaking accuracy. These findings can be considered the first step in drawing scholars’ attention to the benefits of utilizing L2 writing to improve L2 speaking accuracy that have often been overlooked. This research also bridges the gap in our understanding of written and spoken recall of texts written in L2. The relationship between written and spoken recall has primarily been analyzed with English-speaking monolinguals. It has been reported that written recall provides semantically more accurate responses than spoken recall due to the higher cognitive load and attention required to produce a text. The pilot study described in this dissertation examined the written and spoken text recall relationship in L2 learners of Russian, and analyzed how individual working memory capacity influenced both types of recall. Twenty-two Intermediate-Low learners of Russian participated in the study. The obtained results were consistent with results obtained from research on monolingual learners, i.e., written recall provided more accurate responses than spoken recall. The results of this research also support the Cognition Hypothesis suggested by Robinson (2007). According to the Cognition Hypothesis, individual differences in attentional abilities appear to be most relevant when the cognitive demands of tasks are enhanced. In other words, if a task is too easy and does not require increased attentional resources, individual differences in executive attentional abilities will not be as prominent for the task. The text chosen for the pilot study was too easy for responses to correlate with accuracy of the produced text. Longer and more complex texts chosen for the main study resulted in the correlation between working memory and syntactic accuracy and the complexity of produced texts in the spoken mode of recall. Only the written task for all levels of learners was not complex enough for the syntactic complexity to correlate with individual WM capacity in either L1 or L2.
Ludmila Isurin (Advisor)
Mineharu Nakayama (Committee Member)
Wynne Wong (Committee Member)
151 p.
Foreign Language; Language; Linguistics; Slavic Studies
L2 writing; L2 speaking; written recall in L2; spoken recall in L2; working memory in L2; input and output modalities; scaffolding; L2 speaking accuracy

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Sletova, N. (2023). L2 Writing as a Scaffold for L2 Speaking Grammatical Accuracy in a Text- Reconstruction Task [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1681209241796278

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Sletova, Natalia. L2 Writing as a Scaffold for L2 Speaking Grammatical Accuracy in a Text- Reconstruction Task. 2023. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1681209241796278.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Sletova, Natalia. "L2 Writing as a Scaffold for L2 Speaking Grammatical Accuracy in a Text- Reconstruction Task." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2023. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1681209241796278

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)

osu1681209241796278
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This open access ETD is published by The Ohio State University and OhioLINK.