| Category | Date | Participant | Title | Venue |
| Seminar | 13 Dec | Prof Heidi Byrnes | Developing L2 ability: A longitudinal, literacy-oriented view | CityU |
| Professor Heidi Byrnes | ||||
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Developing L2 ability: A longitudinal, literacy-oriented view Date : 13 December 2006 |
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Workshop |
Most studies of L2 learners' evolving writing ability have been based on performances obtained
from isolated and instructionally decontextualized composing tasks which, furthermore, relied
on cross-sectional data. By contrast this presentation draws on a multi-year longitudinal and
cross-sectional investigation of L2 syntactic complexity, based on writing data collected
acress the four years of the intgerated undergraduate program within the German Department at
Georgetown University. The data comprise a corpus of over 250,000 words involving over 300
participants.
In this presentation Professor Heidi Byrnes (1) contextualized the research according to the learners, curriculum, and instructional approaches within an explicitly literacy-oriented program, wherein writing development toward advanced levels of ability was driven by the use of genre-based writing tasks; (2) outlined and justified the research methodology employed for investigating syntactic complexity within L2 writing development, from cross-sectional, longitudinal, and task-based perspectives; and (3) analyzed and interpreted data in terms of curricular predictions, instructional practices, and program-external research findings, with a focus on advanced levels. |
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