Korean EFL Writers' Composing Processes: An Exploratory Study of College Students

For the past 20 years the process approach to writing has been popular in second language writing classrooms. However, there have been very few studies conducted in Korea with regard to the composing processes and the effects of proficiency on writers' usage. The present study attempts to begin to fill this gap. Three groups of college students with different writing proficiency participated in the study: the advanced group, the intermediate group, and the beginning group. The verbal protocol of their writing processes revealed that they approached writing tasks differently. While the advanced writers focused on generating texts and ideas and examined their writing at both global and local levels, the other two groups of students tended to focus on evaluating text at the local level and generated fewer ideas and less text. The findings from this study are then compared to those of some major studies of the composing process as conclusions are subsequently drawn about the specific needs of Korean college writers.