Examining and supporting online writing – a qualitative pre-study for an analytic learning environment

The authors present a project that aims at understanding the way language learners write in social media in their every day lives using the target language. How do our students proceed when writing a Social Network Site (SNS) post? What resources do they use for references on word, sentences and text level? By answering these and related questions through extensive collection of empirical data in an analytic learning environment, the design of which is the next step of this project, the authors aim at creating a comprehensive resource that supports different approaches to writing in social media. In the projects’ first step, which the authors will lay out in this paper, writing processes of a small number of informants were closely analyzed using experiments, interviews and self-reports. The findings showed considerable differences of resource management between students with different backgrounds in formal learning and revealed a differentiation into ‘public’ and ‘private’ space of informal writing in social media, that influenced students’ choices regarding the degree of formal elaboration (with respect to correctness) of their texts.