Comparing writing process and product across two languages: A study of 6 Singaporean university student writers

A number of studies have attempted to probe the writing process of skilled and unskilled native and normative speakers of English. However, very few investigations of the writing process of students learning other languages have been published to date. This article reports a study of 6 Singaporean university students as they produced written texts in Japanese and, for comparison, in their primary written language (English or Chinese). The study examines process and product data separately to see if any relationship exists between an individual writer's process skill and product quality in the two languages. The findings indicate no clear relationship between process and product data in either language, nor between written products in the two languages. At the same time, the investigation uncovers a similarity in writing process for individual subjects across the two languages and a relationship between general level of proficiency in Japanese and the quality of the subjects' written products in that language.