Writers on the Move: Visualizing the Composing Processes Involved in Academic Writing

The present research study aimed to explore covert processes of editing and revision which were involved in writing four different academic text genres (i.e. abstract, conclusion, data commentary, and cover letter) in English language. To this end, six EFL learners with Persian as their mother tongue were recruited to participate in this study. All the participants attended an induction session and each individual participant was invited to attend four writing sessions (total of 26 sessions for all six participants). The think-aloud protocol was employed for participants to verbalize all their thought processes, including stray notions, false starts, and incomplete or fragmentary thoughts, while performing the composition tasks. All the writing sessions were video-recorded and the participants were asked to insert their texts in Microsoft Word, which was in fact linked to the keystroke logging program, that is, Inputlog. The composition tasks were then dropped into Inputlog software to trim (i.e. reconstruct text production). The collected data were analyzed using qualitative content analysis as an interpretation and analysis method based on a three-step procedure proposed by Strauss and Corbin in grounded theory (open coding, axial coding, and selective coding). The results offered four main processes of planning, formulating, evaluating, and reformulating. The reformulating process was further subdivided into editing and revision. To draw a more accurate comparison between the processes, the researchers needed to resort to a statistical apparatus and run the chi square test. The results indicated that there were significant but weak differences between the processes of editing and revision among different text genres. These results could contribute to an understanding of how writing, editing and revising processes could integrate learners into the process of academic writing.