Blog 2

Kobayashi, Hiroe and Carol Rinnert. "Task Response and Text Construction Across L1 and L2 Writing." Journal of Second Language Writing 17.1 (2008): 7-29. ScienceDirect. Web. 11. Feb. 2010.

In their article “Task Response and Text Construction Across L1 and L2 Writing,” Kobayashi and Rinnert use a socio-cognitive approach to conduct a study that “attempts to explore possible effects of L1 (Japanese) and L2 (English) writing experience on the relationship between task response and text construction in both languages” (8). Kobayashi and Rinnert argue that past writing experience in addition to “social and cultural factors…affects students’ ways of defining and approaching a writing task” (9). Kobayashi and Rinnert explain how their study will “investigate…various types of special pre-university preparatory training for Japanese college entrance examinations” in regards to L1 and L2 essays (10). Using first-year university students, they “compare the writing by members of four distinct groups: those with intensive training in both L1 and L2 writing, those with training in only L1, those with training in only L2, and those with no such intensive training” (Kobayashi and Rinnert 10).
The results indicated that both preparatory training and past writing experience did have an effect on the students. The group “whose participants had received only L2 training showed the biggest change in the choice of discourse type” (Kobayashi and Rinnert 14). In the follow-up interviews, Kobayashi and Rinnert asked the students why one form of discourse was chosen over the other. The students with training in L2 “reported…that the purpose of English writing is to convey ideas clearly to the reader, and the use of discourse markers is important for achieving such clarity (Kobayashi and Rinnert 18). In the conclusion, Kobayashi and Rinnert suggest their study found similarities (in terms of discourse marker use and essay structure) between Japanese and English writing. I would recommend this article for three reasons: (a) this research shows us that previous writing experience does affect a student’s choice when responding to a text, (b) the level of L1 and/or L2 writing training has an impact on how a student defines and subsequently approaches a particular text, and (c) the socio-cognitive perspective Kobayashi and Rinnert take allow us to see the “transferability of writing competence across languages” (7).