What is Draft Content Quality

This chapter reports on a comparative study of face-to-face (FTF) and written electronic (WE) conferences as pre-writing activities in the English as a Second Language (ESL) classroom. Twenty-seven intermediate to advanced students participated in the study over a 4 week period. Latent semantic analysis and corpus linguistics measures were used to compare the extent to which the first drafts incorporated the terms and ideas introduced during the 2 types of conferences. Although no difference was found in the length, or semantic or lexical complexity of first drafts, the results indicated greater lexical and semantic similarity between FTF pre-writing conferences and subsequent drafts. In other words, students made better use of the terms and ideas introduced during the FTF conferences when individually writing first drafts. Reasons why this may have been the case are suggested, and directions for further research are offered.