Visualising Multilingual Writers’ Bursts and Profiles in the Initial Writing Phase

The aims of this chapter are to show how different types of bursts can be used to study the writing process, to offer a new type of burst based on visualisations, and to provide examples of how bursts and visualisations can help identify writers’ profiles in the initial phase of writing. This chapter combines theory with term definition to present an empirical study that uses a visualisation tool in a data-driven way.

Writing process research seeks to understand the cognitive processes that underlie final output by examining the actions that take place during the writing process. Such studies may focus on different elements and have specific purposes. For instance, fluency features, including automatically processed linguistic elements (e.g., multiword sequences; Perez-Bettan, 2015; Wray, 2002), and disfluency features, such as pauses and revisions (Baaijen & Galbraith, 2018; Cislaru & Olive, 2018; Ellis & Yuan, 2004), may be investigated. Fluency in writing is a cognitive process that can be studied through the relationships between uninterrupted text production—also known as bursts (i.e., an index of fluent writing)—pauses, and revisions (Cislaru & Olive, 2018). Pauses tend to be more frequent, and bursts tend to be shorter in second language (L2) compared to first language (L1) writing (Chenoweth & Hayes, 2001). Following conventions in writing research, we adopted a pause threshold of ≥ 2 seconds for cognitive pauses when studying bursts, as this pause length is considered a mental preparation of the text from a psycholinguistic point of view (Cislaru & Olive, 2018).