The Veridicality of Think-Aloud Protocols and the Complementary Roles of Retrospective Verbal Reports: A Study from EFL
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The Veridicality of Think-Aloud Protocols and the Complementary Roles of Retrospective Verbal Reports: A Study from EFL Writing Chengsong Yang1
De La Salle University 2019
Abstract This paper reports on a qualitative study that explored the veridicality (i.e., the completeness and accuracy) of think-aloud protocols (TAPs) in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) writing and illustrates how retrospective verbal reports (RVRs) compensated for TAPs in understanding online revision. Forty-three Chinese sophomores, upon writing while thinking aloud, were asked to provide RVRs regarding revisions, and then to reflect on the veridicality of their TAPs. Their reflections were analyzed inductively. Various omissions of thinkalouds were revealed, but they were perceived as not serious, and the accuracy of TAPs was stood by. Further evidence concerning the (in)veridicality was found in the RVRs when 516 episodes of RVRs and corresponding TAPs were compared, and the RVRs were found to offer additional information that concerned intermediate processes leading to revisions. Implications for using TAPs and RVRs in and for EFL writing research and classrooms are given. Keywords Think-alouds Veridicality Online revision Retrospective verbal reports
Introduction Think-aloud protocols (TAPs) are real-time verbalizations of ongoing thoughts generated by informants while they complete a task (e.g., Ericsson and Simon 1993). TAPs & Chengsong Yang [email protected] 1
have been widely used to study writing (e.g., Flower and Hayes 1981), including writing in English as a foreign language (EFL) (e.g., Armengol and Cots 2009; Wang and Wen 2002). The reliance on TAPs seems to unfold an unfading faith in the linkage between what is thought aloud and what is thought about. As Breetvelt et al. (1994) stated explicitly, ‘‘The cognitive activities during the writing process are operationalized as the thinking process that is verbalized and registered during the performance of the writing assignment’’ (p. 109). Despite its wide use, the TA method has limitations: its possible reactivity and nonveridicality. While reactivity relates to whether TAPs affect what is happening mentally during task completion (e.g., Bowles 2010), veridicality is used as a superordinate term that concerns both the completeness issue (i.e., whether TAPs afford complete representations of thinking or cognitive processes, Ericsson and Simon 1993) and the accuracy issue (i.e., ‘‘the possibility that verbalizations, when present, may not be closely related to underlying thought processes—may not be veridical reports of those processes or may be epiphenomenal’’, Ericsson and Simon 1993, p. 109). These limitations of TAPs in reading research have been discussed (e.g., Hu and Gao 2017). In the field of L2 writing, there appear to be more concerns about their reactivity (e.g., Yang et al. 2014; Hyland 2016) than mentions of their nonveridicality (e.g., Armengol and Cots 2009), and only one study on veridicality was conducted, by Barkaoui (2011), which
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