Chapter 4
Adaptive imitation
Formulaicity and the words of others in L2 English academic
writing
This chapter explores how L2 academic writers imitate
adaptively as they manage the need to communicate academic content using
language that aligns with the predictable patterns of the discourse
community. Evidence from two studies of L2 writing is combined to explore
how writers work with a dynamic store of language chunks as their emergent
building blocks. One study, a cross-sectional discourse analysis of the
writing of 480 test-takers (Knoch,
Macqueen, & O’Hagan, 2014), investigates formulaicity and
source text use in two writing tasks. The other, a longitudinal qualitative
case study of a student writer (Macqueen, 2012), takes a close-up view of her word combinations
and use of source texts as she revises an assignment. Taken together, the
findings suggest that the early stages of L2 academic writing are
characterized by greater reliance on verbatim imitation of the patterns of
others and less formulaicity. Over time, L2 writers represent academic
content through interweaving the words of others with their own internalized
patterns in increasingly conventional manipulations.
Article outline
- Introduction
- Fluent formulaicity
- Developmental perspectives on fluent formulaicity
- Source text imitation
- Developmental perspectives on source text imitation
- Two studies
- Study 1: Cross-sectional study of writing test responses
- Aim
- Participants
- Writing data
- Analytic method 1: Fluent formulaicity
- Analytic method 2: Source text imitation
- Statistical analysis
- Findings
- Density of fluent formulae
- Source text imitation
- Summary of Study 1
- Study 2: Longitudinal case study
- Aim
- Method
- Context and focus sentence
- Identification of source text content and patterns for
imitation
- Adaptive imitation of source text
- Summary of Study 2
- Discussion and conclusion
-
Acknowledgements
-
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