Writing process and production of French-speaking learners of English on the basis of a corpus of screencast videos : an error analysis

In the field of language acquisition, writing products have widely been analysed. However, writing process has been left aside, even though it represents a rich source of information about the learner. In this master thesis, both products and process have been analysed, based on the Process Corpus of English in Education (PROCEED) which contains final products and screencast videos of intermediate to advanced French-speaking learners of English. 38 texts and corresponding videos were analysed in order to have a look at the different stages language learners go through and to have a look at the errors that learners correct or not. Results have shown that learners make on average 19,8 errors per text, with an average of 5,5 errors being corrected and 14,3 errors remaining in the final products. Regarding errors remaining in the final products, spelling and punctuation errors constitute 44% of the errors. However, spelling errors are also the most corrected (52,6%). The study of the screencast videos also showed that learners correct their errors at the end of the paragraph or in the revising stage. Reference tools are also used by a huge majority of writers to correct their writings and to translate words from French to English. Concerning the writing process of English learners, we can conclude that writers spent 81,3% of the task on the writing stage. When we look at the order of the stages, 79% of the writers ended the entire composing process with a revising stage.