El desarrollo de la escritura del español como lenguas extranjeras

Abstract

This article presents the first results of a research project on the writing of argumentative essays in English as a foreign language and in Spanish as a foreign language and as a native language, carried out at the University of Nijmegen between 2002 and 2005. The objective of the project is to compare teachers’ holistic assessments with the results of the analysis of syntactic and lexical features of the essays, measure any development in writing skills from one year to the next, and to study the process of feedback and text revision. The first part discusses major aspects of writing, such as the general writing competence, differences between native language writing and second and foreign language writing, and ways to analyse text features in second and foreign language texts. In the second part we present the methodology adopted, and the results of the analyses that have been carried out so far.