Use of Achievement and Reduction Strategies in L2 Writing - Solutions for Productive Competencedeficit Lexical Problems

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

  Vocabulary plays a critical role in the production of successful writing such as when students are asked to write with a time limit, a situation that students often face in their academic lives. Therefore, students need to develop a set of strategies to solve lexical problems during the process of composing. Lexical problems and strategies have been widely researched in the area of communication strategies, but most of this research traditionally focuses on oral production. As such, investigation of writing communication strategies is a novelty within the area of L2 writing process studies. While obtaining data on the lexical aspects of the L2 writing process, this study aims at studying the lexical strategies that L2 writers use to compensate for insufficient lexical knowledge when 20 Korean university students were asked to think-aloud (TA) while writing in English. The TA protocols indicated that the writers used a repertoire of achievement and reduction strategies to compensate for their competence-deficit lexical problems which can be explained within the framework of communication strategies. The study provides pedagogical implications for strategy training that may help students develop strategic competence for solving writing lexical problems.