EFL Writers’ Revision Patterns at Discourse Level and Their Relationship to Writing Proficiency

This study examined unexperienced EFL writers’ discourse level revision patterns and the relationship between these revisions skills and students’ attained L2 writing proficiency. Fifty two students in English composition classes in a local university of Korea were asked to revise an English text that contains coherence problems at three discourse levels: (inter)sentential, paragraph, and essay. These texts were analyzed for revision patterns in two categories (error detection and correction) and in terms of correction strategies used in the revision task. The study shows that students in general revised surface level errors (sentential and intersentential) better than meaning errors at higher discourse level (paragraph and essay). While scores were higher in error detection than in correction, in both categories, intersentential level was the highest in its mean score. Sentence level revision scores were strongly correlated with paragraph revision scores, but not with essay level performance. Inversely, essay level revision was significantly correlated with students’ paragraph level revision, but not with sentence level revision. Attained proficiency was significantly correlated with students’ performance at the intersentential level, but not at higher levels, suggesting that coherence at the essay level is the hardest part of discourse conception in this population. Metacomments on errors, along with addition and deletion, were most preferred forms of revision strategies used. Implications of the findings are discussed.