Strategy use in multilingual professional writing

The ability to produce professional written texts is becoming more and more important in our quickly changing information society. Those who wish to effectively communicate with others must be able to express themselves precisely and eloquently. This can be quite challenging especially when writing in a second language. Successful multilingual writers have elaborated their individual strategies of dealing with theses challenges. Assuming various means of producing professional texts, my research aims to explore individual process as well as strategy and language usage in multilingual professional writing, in order to develop didactic concepts that support individual improvement. The research is focused on writing in German as a second language in academic contexts, though other languages are included as well (primarily English, French and Hungarian). The data shall be elicited in a complex mixed methods approach to be carried out in 4 phases. The first phase is framed by grounded theory and open to various heuristic and empirical methods, including observation and action research during writing lessons, evaluation of explicit notes from 150 students about their writing strategies, and auto-observation in pre-tests with the computer video programme Camtasia. In the second phase a case study approach shall elicit rich data on the process, individual strategy and language usage of 30 multilingual writers (20 students and 10 researchers) in authentic writing environments. They will be asked to use Camtasia to record their processes of producing at least one text in each of the languages for which their command is sufficient for professional writing in academic contexts. Half of the group will be asked to accompany the writing process by thinking aloud (in any language they wish to use). The videos and think-aloud protocols will be analysed together with retrospective interviews with the test persons. These qualitative case studies will be followed by a quantitative questionnaire survey, which is intended to provide data on the distribution and correlations of various strategies and methods of language usage in the writing process. The online questionnaire should be answered by 300 multilingual students and 200 multilingual researchers, mostly at the University of Vienna, but also at other universities with German departments. The questions will be in German. In the fourth phase, based on the results of phases 2 and 3, didactic concepts, which meet the needs of individual strategy development in multilingual writing, shall be developed and refined. The research is based at the University of Vienna: foremost at the Centre for Translation Studies, and partly at the Department of German Philology (German as a Second Language). The results of the work are focused on learning and teaching professional writing in German (as a second/foreign language) in multilingual contexts, though, on a meta-level, they shall have an impact on writing in other languages as well.

Sabine Dengscherz The project PROSIMS Strategies and Routines for professional multilingual writing (V 342) Professional writing can be quite challenging, especially when it comes to writing in a foreign/second language. How do writers manage to write professionally in more than one language? How do multilingual writers organize their writing processes? How do they implement their multilingual language resources and which strategies do they apply to cope with an eventual lack of language proficiency? The research project PROSIMS (Strategies and Routines for multilingual professional writing) focuses on these questions. It explores writing processes, writing strategies, writing routines and the use of language in text production in academic contexts. At the core of the project are case studies with 13 students and 4 researchers. The participants fulfilled authentic writing tasks on their own computers, at times and places of their choice and recorded their writing processes with the screen capturing software (Snagit Techsmith). For the analysis, their writing processes could be watched as video-films showing everything the participants did on their screens while recording: producing or revising text, doing investigations on the internet or take a little pause with a game or a video-clip. The screen-capturing provides authentic insights into individual writing processes. In the case studies, ca. 111 hours of screen capturing-videos have been analyzed. Additionally, we conducted interviews with the participants, asking them about their language biographies and writing experience, the writing tasks they were working on, their approaches to writing in general and the tasks on the videos in particular. Of special interest were challenges occurring during the writing process and strategies for overcoming those challenges. The strategies and routines of the writers were analyzed against the background of the context information from the interviews. Some of the strategies applied are linked to language resources: For example, some writers used multilingual notes when working on complex problems and writing to think about those problems and to work out solutions for them. Based on this empirical research, a new writing process model was developed. The PROSIMS writing process model consists of three parts and focuses on influence factors in writing situations that shape individual writing behavior in these specific situations. The model does not only offer means of modeling writing processes considering individual and situational variation, it additionally helps to initiate reflections on individual challenges, writing strategies and routines in (multilingual) writing. For these aims, it is useful for writing didactics and writing support. At the end of the project, the model was tested in a quantitative questionnaire at the Centre for Translation Studies (University of Vienna). Furthermore, the survey elicited information about the distribution of strategies observed in the case studies. Project-website: https://prosims.univie.ac.at/