Analysing fluency in L2 writing: a focus on the use of formulaic sequences in L2 French

This presentation will explore how the use of formulaic sequences (FS) affects the foreign language (L2) writing process and how their use is related to the length of bursts, which is understood as an index of cognitive fluency in writing (Chenoweth & Hayes 2001); fluency is connected with pause lengths and locations. FSs are units which are stored in memory as a whole and retrieved automatically and efficiently. In consequence, they increase the cognitive fluency of the production process. Their use also seems to be related to individual variation between learners (cf. learner-internal approach, Myles & Cordier 2017). This case study focuses on the use of FSs in the L2 writing process in the university context. The corpus consists of 14 texts written by adult learners of French (intermediate/advanced level). The analysis of the writing process with a keystroke logging tool helps to identify the learner-internal FSs. The analysis is complemented with students' verbalisations collected with an oral stimulated recall protocol. The presentation will illustrate students' pausal behavior in relation to the use of FSs during the writing process and discuss how this information contributes to identifying individual patterns of using automatized sequences (learner-internal FSs). The results show that students' proficiency level has an impact on the variety of the used FSs. Furthermore, frequent and earlier learned expressions like à mon avis (in my opinion) are automatized in students' discourse. Finally, the L2 written French contains various spoken language FS forms like il y a (there is). References: Chenoweth N. A. & Hayes, J. R. (2001). Fluency in writing: Generating text in L1 and L2. Written Communication 18, 80–98. Myles, F. & Cordier, C. (2017). Formulaic sequences (FS) cannot be an umbrella term in SLA. Focusing on psycholinguistic FSs and their identification. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 39, 3-28.