Development of L2 writing: fluency and proficiency

This article is about L2 writing and its development, and it examines fluency in relation to proficiency. Fluency in L2 writing can be understood in two ways: the fluency of the written texts (or the outcome) or the fluency of the writing process. Traditionally, fluency measures have been based on the former. The fluency of the writing process, in contrast, is still an under-researched issue. University students studying English or Swedish as their major subject were asked to write (or type) two texts (a narrative and an argumentative text), and a keystroke-logging programme was used to record the writing process, including pauses and all revisions. The texts produced were assessed for their proficiency on a standard six-point scale. The fluency of the writing process was measured by both traditional (offline) and new (on-line) measures. The findings suggest that fluency measures (of both types) correlate with L2 writing proficiency only to some extent, and thus the relationship is not necessarily a linear one