COST 335: Passengers’ Accesibility of Heavy Rail Systems (Unión Europea)

In light of the factors presented above, it is important to keep in mind that the following language characteristics of generation 1.5 students reflect general findings researchers have reported over the years with a variety of participants and do not represent all generation 1.5 students’ cases. Of course, the same is true of international students, but besides the fact that their L1 literacies and age of arrival are more similar in general, L2 writing research on these students has a longer tradition and more results have been corroborated (see Leki et al., 2008 and Silva, 1993).

In their writing classes, international students are not only in the process of learning specific uses of English and writing conventions, but are also still developing their overall language skills (Friedrich, 2006; Leki, 1992). For example, in his meta-analysis of empirical research on L2 writing features, Silva (1993) reports that, when compared to L1 students, L2 writers tend to writer shorter texts with more morphosyntactic errors, including problems with verbs, prepositions, articles, and nouns. He also notes that stylistic differences are reported on L2 writing, such as a larger number of shorter T-units, less complex coordination but more simple coordination, less subordination, fewer free modifiers, less cohesion, and overall less lexical variety, specificity, and sophistication. In fact, more recent research has underscored that lexical knowledge is among the main linguistic needs of international students (Crossley & McNamara, 2009; 2011; Myers, 2003; Nakamura, 2010). Crossley and McNamara (2009, 2011) have shown, for instance, through sophisticated computational analyses (e.g., Coh-Metrix tools) of large learner corpora data, that international student writers appear to have “less-connected lexical networks than L1 writers” (2009, p. 132). The authors claim that these students’ writing tends to

be not only lexically more simple than that of L1 writers but also more lexically and semantically disengaged, and “less specific and less ambiguous when compared to L1 texts” (2011, p. 281).

In addition, L1 transfer or cross-linguistic influence (CLI), well documented in SLA oral studies, has also been reported in international students’ writing regarding rhetorical and

morphosyntactic structures of learners of different proficiency levels (e.g., Grabe & Kaplan, 1996; Hinkel, 2002; Jarvis, 2010; Jarvis & Pavalenko, 2008; Leki et al., 2008; Reid, 1992), although it appears that the lower the student proficiency level, the more CLI is found (Rinnert & Kobayashi, 2009). Much debate has surrounded the field of contrastive rhetoric since its advent with Kaplan’s (1966) seminal article, but despite the serious controversies this field of study has generated (see Casanave, 2004), that L1 rhetorical knowledge influence – to different extents, given a variety of factors, and in a very complex way – L2 written production is now recognized (Carson, 2001; Grabe & Kaplan, 1996).

On the other hand, scholars have argued that generation 1.5 students tend to lack metalanguage, much like their American high school peers, and their writing may be informal, presenting colloquial language (Ferris, 1999, 2009; Harklau 2000; Harklau & Siegal, 2009; Harklau, Siegal & Losey, 1999; Reid, 1997; Roberge, 2002, 2009). In fact, Doolan’s (2011) large quantitative study revealed that the ‘spoken features of language variable’ was not significantly different between generation 1.5 and L1 students but it was significant between generation 1.5 and international students. Generation 1.5 students’ advanced oral skills can, nonetheless, help them with practice and instruction on grammatical issues that take advantage of this fluency and of their intuitions about English instead of focusing on metalanguage alone (Ferris, 1999).

Researches have also claimed that generation 1.5 students, because of their ‘ear-based’ language acquisition (Reid, 1997), are likely to make more errors in their writing than

international students and L1 students (Ferris, 2009; Muchinsky & Tangren, 1999; Reid, 1997) and that verb errors account for the most common type of errors (Ferris, 2009; Foin & Lange, 2007; Frodesen, 2009; Frodesen & Starna, 1999; Mikesell, 2007; Reid, 1997). The writing of generation 1.5 students has also been characterized by a combination of errors found in L1 and L2 (Ferris, 2009), and research has pointed to lexical problems, such as unsuccessful idiomatic expressions and register-inappropriate lexical choices, as common problems in generation 1.5 students’ writing (e.g., Ferris, 2009; Frodesen, 2009; Frodesen & Starna, 1999; Reid, 1997). However, Nakamura’s (2010, p. 105) study revealed that the advanced fluency of these ‘ear learners’ help them with lexical facility (i.e., “putting words together idiomatically”), flexibility (i.e., “access to alternatives”) and intuition (“ability to judge what ‘‘sounds right’’ or what does not”).

More recent large-scale quantitative research comparing the writing of generation 1.5, international students, and native-speaking students presents a much more complex picture regarding error patterns (e.g., di Gennaro, 2009, 2011; Doolan, 2011; Doolan & Miller, 2012). More specifically, while Doolan and Miller (2012) found many more errors on generation 1.5 student writing when compared to L1 student writing, especially with respect to verbs,

prepositional phrases, and word form, Doolan (2011) found that errors were significantly fewer in the writing of generation 1.5 students than of international students and that generation 1.5 students scored significantly higher in terms of holistic writing quality than the latter. Doolan (2011) argues that the generation 1.5 student writing was actually closer to the L1 student writing sample in his dissertation study. He concluded that “generation 1.5 writers closely resemble the

errors of L1 writers at both developmental and first-year composition (FYC) levels [of the samples in the study]” (Doolan, 2011, p. 131).

Moreover, di Gennaro’s (2009) analyses using a Rash measurement model revealed no difference in the writing of generation 1.5 and international students’ in terms of grammatical, cohesive, or sociolinguistic control. However, a whole-group analysis revealed that generation 1.5 students scored significantly better in rhetorical control than international students. The author posits that generation 1.5 students may “adopt essay organization patterns learned in US high schools, which likely correspond to the expectations of the essay raters in [her] study” (p. 551). Further, a separate-group analysis indicated differences in length and content, with

international students’ texts being shorter but demonstrating a greater ease with content control. In her larger dissertation study, however, di Gennaro’s (2011) findings show quite different trends. First, when using a many-faceted Rash whole-group analysis, she found that international students performed better than generation 1.5 students. Separate-group analyses revealed that international students scored highest for grammatical control and lowest for sociopragmatic control whereas generation 1.5 students’ performance was the opposite: best in sociopragmatic control and lowest in grammatical control. In follow-up qualitative analyses, di Gennaro (2011) found that register knowledge played an important role in the students’

performances. For instance, “international students’ use of sociopragmatic markers reflected a tendency to draw on personal opinions and other non-academic sources” (p. 5), and generation 1.5 students’ grammatical errors pointed to lack of awareness of grammatical features of academic writing.

These apparently conflicting findings may be the result of very different research

used error categories based on previous studies and Doolan’s own qualitative pilot analyses to narrow down the selection of categories used in the studies, which were then coded both manually and using the Biber’s tagger (1988). On the other hand, di Gennaro defined writing performance in terms of the language ability constructs operationalized by Bachman and Palmer (1996) and used Rash measurements to analyze the data. In addition, two incidental findings of these studies may suggest further potential explanations for their contradictory results. In di Gennaro (2009), a greater diversity of scores among the raters for generation 1.5 texts than for international students was found, and the author posited that generation 1.5 students’ writing “may be more problematic for raters to judge, leading to greater discrepancies in scoring due to rater differences and not to student ability” (p.548).An interesting trend was also revealed in Doolan and Miller’s (2012) qualitative analysis of the error patterns in their study. The generation 1.5 verb errors found were “often situated within rather complicated clausal structures” (Doolan & Miller, 2012, p. 9), such as embedding and inversion structures, suggesting that these students may be grappling with complex structures but have not yet achieved a full linguistic control of them, and this “may represent a difference between Generation 1.5 and L2 texts” (Doolan & Miller, 2012 p. 10).

It should also be noted that these four studies did not simply analyze the same data or subsets of the data differently, but in fact used completely different data and data collection procedures. In fact, di Gennaro (2009) and Doolan and Miller (2012) appear to have been pilot studies for di Gennaro’s (2009) and Doolan’ (2011)3 dissertations, and are a reminder of the importance of testing research methods prior to carrying out large scale quantitative studies. The disparities reported in these studies point, nonetheless, to the rather fragmented knowledge base

3

The sometimes lengthy publication process in some fields in academia is most likely the reason for Doolan and Miller’s (2012) pilot study being published after Doolan’s (2011) dissertation was completed.

we currently have of linguistic features in generation 1.5 students’ writing, and they further reflect not only the diversity of these students but also how different and unique their needs may be from international students.

Although composition courses in American post-secondary institutions are far from homogeneous (Canagarajah, 2006; Matsuda, 1999; 2006; Tardy, 2006; 2011), research on multilingual students’ literacies has focused primarily on these students’ experiences from the perspective of L2 specialists and parallels to the field of composition and rhetoric are rarely drawn. In other orders, when exploring the academic literacies of multilingual students, applied linguistics researchers have not compared the multilingual writers’ experiences to those of native-speaking students. Exceptions are the linguistic analyses of Doolan (2011; 2013), Doolan and Miller (2012), Connerty (2009), which compare the language features of international, generation 1.5, and native-speaking writers, and Crossley and McNamara (2009; 2011), which compare texts written by L2 writers (both ESL and EFL learners) and native-speaking students. These studies’ primary focus was on the multilingual students’ writing, and native-speakers texts served as a base-line comparison for their analyses. Thus, the features of native-speakers’ written language are reported in comparison to multilingual students’ writing in those works.

Overall, these comparative linguistic analyses show that the writing of native-speakers is significantly closer to those of generation 1.5 students than that of international students in terms of holistic scores, error types (i.e., spelling, word choice, word errors, subject-verb agreement, determiners, prepositional phrases, verb tense, verb form), and number of words per text. These studies also indicate that, though not statistically significant when compared to the writing of generation 1.5 students, the native-speakers’ texts received the highest holistic scores and presented the fewest errors in the categories listed above.