Concurrent Protocol

KEVIN LLOYD V. HIJASTRO

PRESENTER
Searching for words: One strategic use of
the mother tongue by advanced Spanish
EFL writers
Liz Murphy
Department of English Philology, University of Murcia ,Campus de la
Merced, Spain
Julio Roca de Larios
Department of Language Didactics, Faculty of Education, University of
Murcia, Campus de Espinardo, Spain
Research Questions:

1. Do EFL writers struggle to solve lexical problems when composing

at advanced levels of L2 proficiency?

2. Does the number of lexical searches vary as a result of the

demands of the task?

3. Do these advanced learners use their mother tongue in their

attempts to solve these lexical problems?
Research Questions:

4. Does the number of lexical searches involving the L1 vary

depending on the different demands of the task these writers
are carrying out?

5. Does the type of lexical searches involving the L1 vary

depending on the different demands of the task these writers
are carrying out?

6. What, if any, is the role played by the L1 (Spanish) in solving

these lexical searches?
• Concurrent Protocol is also called the “think aloud
method”.
• Concurrent verbal Protocol. It provides more procedural
information (Bowers and Snyder, 1990).
• Designers can be involved with concurrent protocols
without altering their cognitive processes (Ericsson ad
Simon, 1993).
• Subjects simultaneously design and verbalize their design
thoughts. Studies using concurrent protocols reveal
details of sequences of information processes reflecting
the designer’s short-term memory (STM).
Method and Procedure

• This study forms part of a larger body of data

collected for the Murcia Writing Project.
• In the wider project 21 students did four writing
tasks: two in the L1 and two in the L2.
• The present study draws its data from the
advanced level group carrying out the L2 tasks: an
argumentative and a narrative essay.
Informants
• The informants were seven students who had just graduated from
The University of Murcia English Department after completing a 5-
year first degree in English Language and Literature (Filologı ́a
Inglesa).
• There were six women and one man, a balance that was roughly
representative of the year group, and they were all aged 23–24.
• The seven writers had been studying English at school and
university from sixth-grade, a total of 12 years, and obtained
scores between 174 and190 on the Oxford Placement Test (Allan,
1983), which was used as a measure of their second language
proficiency.
Data collection procedures

-Concurrent protocols were employed as needed access to writers’ online

processing in order to see the ways they employed their two languages.
-Instructions were given to students, the creation of a non-threatening
environment, and the conditions for the recordings.
-As far as the instructions given to informants and the trial run were
concerned, they followed standard procedures in eliciting protocol data
(see Mancho ́n et al., 2005).
-Before the first recording, the participants were asked in Spanish to
verbalize all their thinking while composing their essays, but they avoided
modelling the method so as not to influence their choice of language since
they were particularly interested in the spontaneous use of the mother
tongue.
Data collection procedures

• They were then assigned a mock-composition to practice thinking aloud while

the researchers selectively listened in, occasionally encouraging them to keep
verbalizing, until the informants had clearly grasped the technique (about 20
minutes).
• All students were recorded at the same time in separate language laboratory
booths to avoid any interaction between them and to reduce interaction with
the researchers, one of whom was their former English language teacher.
These recordings took place outside normal classroom time. Writers had one
hour to complete each task, and two weeks elapsed between each session.
• Since the focus of the general study was strategy use as writers struggled with
composing problems, no dictionary use was allowed.
Tasks

-As mentioned earlier, the informants completed two tasks: a narrative and
an argumentative essay, both taken from Raimes (1987).

 Write about something that went wrong in your life. Write about what
happened, when, where, how you felt about it then, and how you feel
about it now.

 Success in education is influenced more by the student’s home life and

training as a child than by the quality and effectiveness of the
educational programme. Do you agree or disagree?
Data analysis

Coding is a process of identifying a passage in the text or other data items,

searching and identifying concepts and finding relations between them. It is
“how you define what the data you are analyzing about” (Gibbs, 2007).

The coding system, based on cognitive, problem-solving theories of writing,

had to allow us to differentiate between planning, formulation, and revision so
that we might then home in on lexical searches in formulation. We used the
coding system described in Roca de Larios et al. (2001) in which, after coding
easily identifiable episodes in the protocols (reading the assignment,
interpreting the task, rereadings, etc.), the researchers proceeded to draw the
lines between formulation and the other two macro-processes, planning and
revision.
Each search process was coded in its entirely in the protocols as
a lexical search. At times the initiation of the problem space
was explicitly signaled, as when the writer asks
‘‘? Co´mo se dice X?’’ (How do you say X?),
thereby indicating a candidate pre-text, or remarks
‘‘no se´ hacer esto’’ (I don’t know how to do this).
Problems were also revealed at times by metalinguistic
statements, for example,
‘‘ ? co´mo puedo introducir X?’’ (How can I introduce X?)
or by evaluations at different levels, for example,
‘‘No, eso no me suena’’ (No, that doesn’t sound right to me).
These constituted explicit indications, which clearly aid in the
identification of a problem space, but the presence of a problem
could also be revealed by more implicit clues, such as long pauses,
rereadings, repetitions of a word in the L1 or L2 (used as a memory
probe), or repetitions with rising intonation, all of which might be
followed by candidate lexical pre-texts. Where we could find no
clear evidence of a search process involving ‘‘steps’’ and merely
found the writer verbalizing one lexical item followed by another
with no apparent problem, or other variations that did not appear
to involve any struggle, we labelled these as simple or ‘‘binary’’
searches and excluded them from our analysis (see Cumming,
1990, who makes a similar distinction).
The researchers working with the protocols were
bilingual in English and Spanish. One of them first
analyzed the protocols and identified all instances of
lexical searches. The second researcher took a
random sample (four of the protocols, i.e., about
30%) and did the same. There was total agreement
in 85% of the cases and, after discussing the problem
cases and reaching a consensus, the first researcher
continued to analyze the remaining protocols.
As far as the treatment of the data was concerned, they calculated the
searches produced by each informant in each of the two essays they wrote.
The counted those searches that used the L1 in some way and worked out
what percentage these formed of the total number of searches. However,
some informants wrote much longer essays than others, so, in order to be
able to make comparisons in Research Question 2 (global number of lexical
searches) and in Research Questions 4 and 5 (those lexical searches
involving L1 use), they needed to iron out these variations by calculating the
number of searches each writer produced for every hundred words of essay.
In other words, we divided the number of searches by the total number of
words in the essay and multiplied the result by 100, which gave them a
figure that allowed comparisons across informants and tasks.
Question 1. Do EFL writers struggle to solve lexical problems
when composing at advanced levels of L2 proficiency?

It reveals that Spanish writers struggled to express their

meaning in their English compositions producing a total of 83
lexical searches over 14 texts, ranging from a minimum of four
searches to a maximum of 25 by any one individual. Thus, it is
clear that even at an advanced stage of learning English, L2
writers have to work hard to find the words that will
successfully express the ideas they have in their minds.
Question 2. Does the number of lexical searches vary as a result of the
cognitive demands of the task?

As far as the variable of task was concerned, a Wilcoxon signed ranks

test carried out on the data in Table 3 revealed that the number of
lexical searches produced in the argumentative task (M = 1.87, SD =
1.14) was significantly higher (z = 2.366, p = 0.018) than those in the
narrative (M = 0.6, SD = 0.4). Moreover, the greater production of LSs in
the argumentative task is not only evident at group level but also for all
seven individuals, who consistently produced more lexical searches per
hundred words on the argumentative than on the narrative task.
Question 3. Do these advanced learners use their mother tongue in their attempts to
solve these lexical problems?

The third research question concerned the role played by the mother tongue in solving,
or at least attempting to solve, lexical problems. Table 4 discloses a remarkable fact
considering the advanced level of these EFL learners: With the exception of Writer C,
these graduates all used their mother tongue in some way in their attempts to retrieve
language with which to express their meanings in writing.
For the group as a whole, the raw figure is 60 out of a total of 83
searches, 72% of the total. Considering each task individually, the
table shows that in the argumentative task the L1 was used in 39
lexical searches out of a total of 56, which represents a percentage of
70%, while in the narrative this percentage is still higher: The writers
used their L1 in 78% of the cases, that is, in 21 lexical searches out of
the 27 attempted during the completion of this task. However, if we
consider the individuals rather than the groups, Writer C has not used
the L1 in any lexical search at all while Writer G, in stark contrast, has
used the L1 in every one of his numerous lexical searches. Thus, what
can be observed here are striking individual differences within the
same English proficiency level.
Question 4. Does the number of lexical searches involving the L1 vary depending on the
different demands of the task these writers are carrying out?

Table 5 presents the number of searches involving L1 use converted into a percentage of the total
words in each essay. A Wilcoxon signed rank test indicated that the informants produced
significantly more lexical searches involving the L1 (z = 2.201, p = 0.028) in the argumentative task
(M = 1.29, SD = 0.45) than in the narrative (M = 0.45, SD = 0.45). Therefore, our data allow us to
affirm that differing task demands affect the use of the L1 in lexical searches to a significant extent.
Question 5. Does the type of lexical searches involving the L1 vary depending on the different
demands of the task these writers are carrying out?

As noted in the method section, in order to get a clearer picture of the type of lexical problems
that these writers tackle, their word searches were classified into two distinct groups: the
compensatory type and the upgrading type. If we consider the influence of our task variable, a
comparison of the mean number of LSs in which writers used the L1 for upgrading purposes
revealed that there were three times as many searches of this type in the argumentative task (M =
0.64, SD = 0.49) as in the narrative task (M = 0.21, SD = 0.23), and this difference proved to be
statistically significant on a Wilcoxon signed rank test (z = 2.201, p = 0.028), so the argumentative
task seemed to require more L1 support when refining and improving lexical choices than the
narrative one. The relation between the total frequencies for the compensatory purposes of LSs
appeared on the surface to be similar to that for upgrading; however, the difference in their use
across the two tasks did not turn out to be statistically significant. Thus, we cannot affirm that
either of the tasks produced more L1 use than the other for those lexical searches initiated for
compensatory purposes. Nor was any statistically significant relationship found between upgrading
and compensatory purposes within each task in spite of the surface-level similarities in their
means.
Question 6. What is the role played by the mother tongue in Lexical
Searches?

A close examination of all the cases in which our informants used Spanish
in their lexical searches revealed certain recurring patterns of use involving
the L1, which they classified into six main purposes:
• generating lexical units,
• backtracking through the text,
• evaluations and decisions at different levels,
• self-questioning,
• metalinguistic appeals,
• and meta comments.
Thank you for listening!