| This study challenges the usefulness and validity of the ACTFL Guidelines for writing proficiency and seeks to dispel the myth that college students are not capable of writing at high levels of sophistication in L2.; Fourteen compositions across two tasks, a persuasive letter to the editor and an expressive essay on an abstract topic, were elicited within the normal framework of an undergraduate composition course in which a supportive context for writing was provided. Based on holistic (four-point) and analytic (ESL Composition Profile) ratings determined by two native-speaker scorers, a subgroup of eleven successful essays was targeted and analyzed for their outer structure, the nature and organization of arguments or "text actions" within each paragraph, the degree of pragmatic signalling the discourse contained, and the nature of students' errors.; Findings revealed that the most successful non-native texts communicated at multiple levels of meaning and contained many features which are currently overlooked in the assessment of L2 writing. Among others, these are the close interrelationship of the discourse and paragraph structure to the author's individual message, a high level of reader interaction with the text based on frequent requirements for reader inferencing, and a wide array of poetic features which were present in both the persuasive and the expressive writing. The error analysis indicated that students' primary difficulty in German at highly-advanced levels rests within the lexicon and the lexico-grammatical requirements of complex German verbs. Mistakes in German structures were less frequent and demonstrated a tendency for double-marking, suggesting that this may be a natural stage in the developing interlanguage of American undergraduates.; In the broadest sense, the findings indicate that non-native writers of German are in fact capable of writing at a high level of sophistication even though their texts are still not error-free. They point to the need for the ACTFL Guidelines to be revised and offer a means by which features such as "rhetorical organization" and "audience tailoring" can be identified in real samples of student writing. |
