The affordances of process-tracing technologies for supporting L2 writing instruction

Abstract

The research literature on L2 writing processes contains a multitude of insights that could inform writing instruction, but writing teachers are constrained in their capacity to make use of these insights insofar as they lack detailed information about how their students actually engage in the processes of writing. At the same time, writing-process researchers have been using powerful technologies that are potentially applicable in educational settings to trace writers’ process engagement—namely, keystroke-logging and eye-tracking. In this article, we describe a pilot effort to integrate these technologies into L2 writing instruction with college-level ESL students. In addition to illustrating three key affordances of these technologies that emerged from the piloting, we discuss the conceptual framework that informed our efforts as well as challenges that will need to be addressed to facilitate further integration of process tracing into L2 writing pedagogy.