Investigating Second Language Development in Writing Using the Extremely Short Story Task

This study investigated whether Japanese university students show second language (L2) writing development underlying these behaviors; whether teachers' corrective feedback affects linguistic accuracy, complexity and fluency of written output during five essay writing tasks.Frequent errors during the writing tasks were also analyzed.Participants were 18 intermediate L2 writers, who completed five essay writing tasks.The writing tasks required a rigid submission rule.Participants were required to write an essay with exactly fifty words.Participants' writing behaviors were analyzed from the perspective of second language writing development.However, the present study disconfirms predictions regarding syntactic complexity, linguistic accuracy and fluency.Implications for research, evaluations of essay writing and pedagogy are discussed.