Abstract
This case study extends our analysis of text construction in three languages to look at four Japanese university students, all intermediate-level multilingual writers. We aim to contribute to the recent research exploring multilingual writers’ advantages (Ortega, Understanding second language acquisition. Hodder Education, London, 2019) by shedding light on the kinds of strategies they employed when writing in multiple languages, examining the writers’ choices of text features and their composing processes. We analyzed argumentation essays in three different languages (English, Japanese, and French, Korean, or Spanish), think-aloud data, and in-depth interviews. We found that despite individual differences, they all employed shared text features in L2 and L3 but used some distinct features in L1. They also creatively reshaped particular features across languages, such as ways of presenting arguments and counterarguments. In the composing process, they frequently employed expanded resources for language use, involving L1, L2, and combined languages (translanguaging) when they planned, formulated, or revised their L2/L3 text. Significant findings included uncovering a close interrelationship between selected text features and composing processes, and discovering interactions between individual writers’ language motivation and development of their multilingual writing. While the writer’s life experiences led to individual differences, being multilingual helped the writers construct text effectively across languages.
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Notes
- 1.
We presented a preliminary version of this study at the AAAL conference in Toronto, Canada (Kobayashi & Rinnert, 2015).
- 2.
We should point out that TA analysis requires immense time, energy, and patience. We found that adding individual follow-up sessions helped us greatly in categorizing the writers’ composing activities reliably. As for limitations, we should have given the participants more practice in thinking aloud before they began writing their essays, and video-taping instead of only audio-taping the sessions would have made the follow-up sessions easier.
- 3.
To gain a clear picture across multiple languages and varying text lengths, we adjusted (standardized) the frequencies of the composing activities. To do this, for each essay, we divided the number of composing activities by the number of T-units (minimally terminable unit). A T-unit is a commonly used measure that consists of one independent clause together with any number of dependent clauses (Hunt, 1965).
- 4.
This phenomenon is well-known in the sociolinguistic literature as a “classic” kind of intrasentential code-switching. In such cases, a dominant language is the “matrix language” with the other language filling slots in the utterance framed by the grammatical structure of the matrix language (Coulmas, 2005, pp. 116–117).
- 5.
As opposed to Sasaki et al. (2018), we considered global planning at any stage of the composing process, rather than limiting it to the pre-writing stage.
- 6.
Unlike Sakura, the other three writers all had more local than global planning. Their combined average percentage was 27% global vs. 73% local in the L2 essay, and 35% global vs. 65% local in L3.
- 7.
Chie used the same strategy in her L3 essay, but repair (at 14.2%) was not as frequent as translating (at 19.0%).
- 8.
The most obvious cases of “strong translanguaging” were seen in Sakura’s TA data, where she engaged in what has been called “code-meshing” by Canagarajah (2011) and others. Code-meshing refers to the way two or more languages are intertwined in a hybrid way, with both languages functioning in similar ways. A clear-cut example of code-meshing can be seen in the following excerpt from Sakura’s TA data while repairing her L2 essay (English translation shown in brackets with originally Japanese words italicized): “…it is true that がよかったけど, I use it for the previous sentence…” […“it is true that” is good (to say here) but, I use it for the previous sentence...]. In this example, Sakura questions her use of the English phrase “it is true that” using half Japanese (“[it’s] good [to say here] but”) and half English (“I use it for the previous sentence”) before replacing “it is true that” with “indeed.”
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Kobayashi, H., Rinnert, C. (2023). L1/L2/L3 Writers’ Advantages: Text and Process. In: Developing Multilingual Writing. Multilingual Education, vol 42. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12045-9_7
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