Learner Behaviours in an Integrated Academic Reading-into-Writing Task: An Exploratory Case Study in the Hungarian University Context

Abstract

English as a foreign language teacher trainees often write literature reviews as part of their assignments and, in some cases, these form part of their high-stakes tests. Compared to the number of publications available on how to write high quality literature reviews in the field of social sciences, studies focusing on particular aspects of learners’ performance on this genre are sparse. Therefore, the aim of this exploratory case study was to report on what kinds of learner behaviours an integrated academic reading-into-writing task elicits in the case of a Hungarian EFL teacher trainee in order to trigger possible alterations to the preparatory courses and the examination task. The results suggest that the participant mostly experienced genre-specific content related problems on the sentence level, and a showed a lack of learner strategy use focusing on the content and coherence of the text. The reasons for this are partly attributed to the short training time, lack of experience, slow skills transfer, and time limit constraints. Implications of the outcomes regard the test environment and updating the content of the preparatory courses to allow for more training time. This may result in improved genre-specific knowledge and in the activation of more effective test-taking strategies.