In Dutch L1 classrooms, style in non-fictional genres is typically taught by means of normative exercises in which students are tasked to identify stylistic lapses. Not much is known about the effectiveness of such exercises when teaching style. Unknown factors include what kinds of stylistic shortcomings are found in Dutch students' writing, and how the occurrence of certain stylistic lapses relates to writing quality. The current study empirically explores these scarcely investigated issues. Teachers rated 125 argumentative texts written by tenth-grade pre-university students by means of comparative judgement. Additionally, these texts were manually analyzed to investigate the occurrence of stylistic lapses, taking into account stylistic lapses that are common in text books ('standard category') and other types of style related errors ('other category'). Multilevel regression analyses revealed that only one of the stylistic lapses from the standard category negatively influenced text quality as evaluated by teachers, namely the use of detached phrases. In the other category, only mistakes in question marks negatively predicted text quality. A final model including those two predictors explained 11.1% of the variance in text quality. The article discusses the implications of these findings for non-fictional style education, suggesting that it might need to be refocused.
This paper gives an analytic description of why and how an instructional writing program on the improvement of cross-genre writing skills in German secondary grade level has been designed and implemented. From a diagnostic research phase, and according to theoretical expectations, coherence management and perspective taking proved to be ability components that substantially contribute to text quality across different genres. To train these two abilities in a didactical setting, two 11-unit writing courses were analogously constructed and administered in 5th and 9th grades. There were 12 intervention classes and 12 control classes in each grade, forming 48 classes with 1.145 participants. The decisions that lead to the design of the intervention study and the corresponding didactical settings are explained and justified in detail, and the developed self-learning materials are described in terms of their assumed learning potentialls and the underlying didactical principles. Based on the obtained empirical experiences, the intervention is critically evaluated with respect to good intervention research and its proper description'.
Writing and translation are traditionally addressed as two different objects of study. However, they also share many characteristics as revealed by the research carried out in the two fields, which often uses the same methods to investigate both areas. In this introduction, it is suggested that writing and translation can be studied as types of text production. Different dimensions of text production are sketched as examples of research topics at the interface between writing and translation. The two articles that follow this introduction explore two such dimensions: competence and profiles.
This article seeks to formulate translator profiles based on process data from keylogging and eye-tracking, while at the same time identifying features which are shared by all translators in a sample consisting of both students and professionals. Data have been collected from 12 professional translators and 12 graduate students translating three texts of varying complexity. We found that individual behavioural characteristics with respect to initial orientation in the source text (ST), online ST reading, and online and end revision remained relatively constant across texts of varying complexity, supporting our hypothesis that translator profiles can be observed which are independent of the difficulty of the translation task. The analysis of the data also indicated that translators could be grouped into broad categories of locally-oriented and globally-oriented translation styles, which are partly, though not entirely, comparable to styles known from writing research. We also identified shared features with respect to reading and revision behaviour during drafting. Common to all translators was that they looked beyond the source text word they were about to translate, and that they made revisions while drafting the translation.
