The questionnaire was distributed to a group of 110 first-year students, from which six were selected as subjects. Then each of the subjects was asked to produce an English essay on the topic assigned. Specifically, they were asked to write the essay according to what they reported in the questionnaire they normally do when given written assignments from their English teachers (i.e. write a draft in Thai first and then translate it into English). They were also asked to think aloud as they were writing. An audiotape recorder was used to record what they thought aloud. One of the researchers (the first writer) sat near the subjects to observe which words they sought in their dictionaries and to remind them to keep talking if they were silent. Finally, the retrospective semi-structured interviews were recorded