Revisions, Resource Consultations and Their Interplay: A Study of L2 Student Writers

Revisions and the consultation of resources are both central components of L2 student writing and essential elements in developing writing skills. In this study we aim to create insights into the writing practices of L2 student writers by exploring textual revisions and digital resource consultations, and their possible interplay. Such insights will benefit researchers and teachers in the field of second language writing and can eventually be used to support L2 students in improving their writing skills. The revisions and external resource consultations of four Danish second-year university students during the writing of a Spanish press release were captured using screen recording software and later analysed manually. Results suggest that revisions of form were far more common than revisions of content indicating that the students succeeded in generating suitable content, which did not often require revision. Results also indicate that students, by far, preferred to consult the traditional online bilingual dictionary as an external resource. This suggests that the most common problems were lexical in nature. Moreover, almost one fifth of the revisions were carried out after consulting external resources which suggests that the students frequently demonstrated the capacity to solve the problems solely by means of internal resources.