Young EFL Emergent Writers: an Investigation into Vocabulary and Textual Features of High and Low Achievers’ Writing

Studies on the measurement of young L2/FL learners' writing not only focus on general features of written texts but attend to some distinctive features of beginning learners (e.g., spelling).Bae and Lee (2012) proposed five trait factors (grammar, content, coherence, spelling, and text length) for primary school EFL learners and found that the factors were valid to gauge their writing proficiency.The students made significant improvements in all the dimensions by the end of an eighteen-month EFL programme.The findings also indicate that rating scales used for writing produced by beginning EFL learners should also consider distinctive features (e.g., spelling) that need not be attended to in advanced learners' writing.While Bae and Lee's (2012) study provided a comprehensive measurement of young EFL learners' writing abilities from five trait factors, other studies narrow the scope to only one specific feature.Among the various factors, writers' vocabulary knowledge is fundamental because grammatical encoding is lexically-driven (Levelt, 1999).For young learners, spelling is the most discussed because it reflects learners' ability to "encode" the language (Bae & Bachman, 2010).He and Wang's ( 2009) longitudinal study investigated the invented spelling of young EFL learners (i.e.spelling words based on knowledge of grapheme-phoneme principles (e.g., "cooke" for "cookie") in their writing.The findings demonstrated that young learners' spelling mistakes in writing may be attributed to their lack of morphological knowledge and inaccurate understanding of lexical representations of phonemes in words.Other studies at the word level examined vocabulary use.For example, Kim and Hwang (2022) found that high-proficiency young EFL learners tended to use complex verb patterns (e.g., "Mary faxed John a letter") more frequently in their writing.Low-achieving learners, however, simply used verbs with limited knowledge of these complex patterns (e.g., "The boy is a student").Although these studies highlight the importance of accurate spelling and rich vocabulary knowledge in writing, little is known as regards the vocabulary profile of young EFL learners' writing.Compared with the empirical evidence on young EFL learners' writing abilities at the word level, these learners' writing practices at the clausal and text levels have received even less attention.Although the proper use of connectives ensures writing cohesion and coherence at the sentence and textual levels (Crossley et al., 2016), in Férez Mora et al.'s (2021) study of Grade-6 Spanish EFL learners, low-achieving writers employed fewer causal conjunctions than high-achievers did; there were even zero occurrences of contrastive and temporal conjunctions in low-proficiency learners' writing.The findings imply lowachieving writers' limited knowledge of connectives.Furthermore, EFL learners need to equip themselves with genre knowledge (knowledge about language and structural features of a specific text type) (Christie & Derewianka, 2008).In primary-level EFL classes, letters and stories are two genres that have been much discussed, but they differ in function and structure.Stories consist of orientation, complication, evaluation, resolution, and coda (Christie & Derewianka, 2008), while greeting, body text, and farewell are included in personal letters (Bae & Bachman, 2010).The current literature implies that the genre knowledge of young learners needs to be developed.Taking the functional linguistic perspective, Christie and Derewianka (2008) found that, in story writing, L1 adolescent writers were more capable of building abstraction and generalisation, whereas young learners (aged 6-8) demonstrated considerable use of unmarked topical themes and excessive reliance on personal pronouns.However, there is a scarcity of research exploring whether low-and high-proficiency young EFL writers exhibit different degrees of genre awareness.Considering the insufficient evidence depicting high-and low-proficiency young learners' writing at the word, clausal, and text levels, this study set out to fill the gaps by investigating the vocabulary profiles, spelling, connective use, and genre awareness in Hong Kong primary-level EFL learners' writing.