An Empirical Study of EFL Writing at Primary School

by Ruth Trüb (University of Education FHNW, Switzerland)

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This poster presents findings of the research project “An Empirical Study of EFL Writing at Primary School” (2016–2020, Canton of Aargau, Switzerland). The project investigated the writing competence of 12–13-year-old EFL learners in their fourth year of learning English. Besides measuring the learners’ EFL writing competence and analysing text qualities at different CEFR language levels, the project inquired about current teaching practices and the learners’ perception of EFL writing and studied the effect of individual and educational factors on the learners’ writing competence. The study aimed at laying a foundation for further research and discussion of primary EFL writing methodology. 

The construct definition of writing which formed the foundation of the research project was based on communicative and competency-based language teaching (Richards & Rodgers, 2014). Writing competence was defined “as the writer’s ability to use his or her personal and external resources in order to effectively and responsibly perform real-world writing tasks” (Trüb, 2022, p. 32). Thus, the learners (n = 322) completed two communicative writing tasks, an email and a story, which were situated in contexts of young learners’ everyday life. The texts were rated independently by two raters with an inter-rater reliability between 0.78 and 0.94. A many-facet Rasch analysis was conducted to adjust the final scores for task difficulty, rater severity and difficulty of the rating criteria, and a standard setting was implemented to align them to the CEFR language levels. Teacher and learner questionnaires and a small number of learner interviews (n = 9) were used to collect further data.

Results show that the learners’ EFL writing competence ranges from below A1.1 to above A2.2. Detailed linguistic analyses of text samples illustrate the learners’ writing competence at different language levels. Motivation, resources and task demands seem to be key aspects influencing the learners’ perception of EFL writing. Self-efficacy and extra-curricular use of English were shown to be significant predictors of the learners’ EFL writing competence. Further research would be required to reliably investigate the effect of educational factors.

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References:

Richards, J., & Rodgers, T. (2014). Approaches and methods in language teaching (3rd ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Trüb, R. (2022). An empirical study of EFL writing at primary school. Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto. doi.org/10.24053/9783823395430