Korean L2 writers' previous writing experience: L1 literacy development in school

Abstract

Contrastive rhetoric studies have explored how language and culture influence the rhetorical organization of second language (L2) writing through text analysis. In recent years, contrastive rhetoric has begun to investigate social contexts surrounding the production of written texts as potential sources of differences between texts written by native English speakers and L2 writing. Since writing is usually learned through formal education in school, L2 learners’ schemata for the organization of written discourse are very much likely to be developed throughout schooling in their mother tongue and the schemata might affect the process and product of L2 writing later on. The purpose of this study is to investigate Korean L2 writers’ previous writing experiences in school in their mother tongue in order to better understand their current knowledge about writing and how their prior knowledge and experiences would affect L2 writing. To those ends, a questionnaire was administered to a total of 251 high school 11th graders in Korea. The main topics of the questionnaire included student perceptions of instruction practices in terms of reading and writing, text types, writing processes, and assessment criteria. Implications of the findings obtained from the questionnaire for L2 writing pedagogy at the post-secondary level are discussed.