This dissertation research investigated the role of online discussion in students’ experience in an academic writing class. As an intervention study, I implemented 20-minute-long online discussions at the end of every class period over a semester as part of required class activities and measured students’ subsequent timed writings and their first and final essays to trace some possible influence from online discussion to their writing development. Topics for online discussions were organized according to course objectives and the day’s lesson, with students developing subtopics reflecting their own interest according to the evolution of each discussion. These topics included theoretical concepts on academic writing as well as orthographical, lexical, grammar, and discourse-related inquiries. Participants included 10 treatment and 12 control students registered in two sections of a rhetoric and composition course designated for non-native English speaking students at a private university. This course was not an ESL class, but was part of the regular composition course offerings, except that it was restricted to international students specifically. Data sources included the treatment group’s 26 online discussion transcripts, 12 sets of timed writings, individual interviews, field notes, two types of essays, and surveys. The control group contributed essays, one set of timed writing taken in the middle of the semester, survey responses, five class recordings, and an instructor interview. Data analysis was performed by using a mixed method approach. Results from online discussion transcripts revealed that treatment students made use of online discussions for their learning, shown through types and characteristics of language-, content-, and writing-related episodes and the semester-long changes and pattern in such talk. Interviews and survey data showed students’ positive learning experiences and changes in their perception toward computer-mediated learning experiences over the semester. In terms of students’ writing, the treatment group made significant improvement in their timed writings over the semester and also outperformed the control group in essay writing significantly, in five of seven categories on a writing rubric. The most significant finding from this study was the improvement of treatment students’ writing scores over the semester. This study suggests the possible value of incorporating computer-mediated instruction in writing instruction as well as future research ideas that bridge research on traditional L2 writing and technology-enriched language learning. / text

This present study investigates the development of second language (L2) Chinese learners’ writing by 1) subjective ratings of essay quality, 2) a battery of objective measures representing the general syntactic complexity as well as specific syntactic features, and 3) the sources of verb phrase complexity used by learners of different institutional levels. This study first compares the subjective ratings of the essays written by learners across four institutional levels and then uses Cumulative Linked Model to examine the contribution of the objective measures of linguistic features to the essay ratings. This study further identifies a number of sources used by learners to construct complex verb phrases, which is an important contributor of the essay rating, and compares the amount of usages by learners at different institutional levels. The purpose of the study is to better understand L2 Chinese learners’ syntactic development in writing from multi-dimensional perspectives, and to identify the most crucial elements that determine the quality of writing. This study recruits 105 L2 Chinese college learners to write a narrative essay and an argumentative essay according to the prompts. Each of the writing sample is rated by two independent raters according to the holistic ACTFL Proficiency Guidelines, as well as the analytic rubric which was adapted from the ESL Composition Profile for this study. The derivation of syntactic complexity measures was based on the rank scales of lexicogrammar in Systemic Functional Linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), involving 12 features at the levels of clause complex, clause, and verb phrase, some of which represent constructions unique to Chinese. A series of statistical tests, including Kruskal-Wallis tests, Dunn’ tests, Spearman’ correlation tests, and CLM are performed to answer that research questions. The findings show that 1) learners’ overall writing quality measured by holistic and analytic ratings do not show significant differences across the first several academic years; 2) higher-level learners are more heterogeneous in writing ability than lower-level learners; 3) phrasal complexity contributes more to the essay quality than clausal complexity; 4) syntactic complexity features that learners develop fastest hardly overlap with those that contribute most to the essay rating; 5) complex verbal phrases come from 10 different sources and the composition of complex verbal phrases remain stable across the groups; and 6) essay types makes significant differences in terms of holistic and analytic ratings, use of syntactic complexity features, as well as their contribution to the essay ratings. From the pedagogical view, this study points out that instruction should focus more on complexity at the phrasal level, especially nominalization and complex verb phrases, that play a more important role to determine the writing quality. Some of the current focus in instruction may not necessarily lead to better quality or higher proficiency in Chinese writing.

Although much research has reported the effectiveness of task repetition on oral performance (Bygate, 2018), few studies have investigated its effectiveness on writing performance (Manchón, 2014), especially in languages other than English. For instance, Nitta and Baba’s (2014) longitudinal study revealed that EFL undergraduates considerably progressed their syntactic complexity and lexical aspects, but not fluency, through repeating a timed writing task. In relation to the task repetition, however, whether and how L2 learners develop their grammatical accuracy and communicative adequacy (Pallotti, 2009) has remained unclear in the literature. Furthermore, in addition to the linguistic measurements and the qualitative assessments, scant research has attempted to investigate whether any significant changes are brought about in terms of learners’ perceptions through repeating language tasks. <br>Therefore, the current study has shed new light on the developmental changes in the writing performance of Japanese-as-a-foreign-language (JFL) learners. It investigated whether any remarkable changes are brought about in terms of overall complexity, complexity by subordination, accuracy, and fluency through repeating a weekly “15-Minute Writing Task” throughout one academic semester (16 weeks) and one academic year (32 weeks). The writing task topics were considered in terms of the Cognition Hypothesis (Robinson, 2001), which states that different cognitive demands of tasks will lead to different L2 output. Regarding this point, this study explored whether there were any significant differences between two task types: descriptive and argumentative essays. JFL learners who were enrolled in an intermediate-level course at an American university engaged in the two different types of timed writing tasks.<br>First, the one-semester investigation, based on the pre/posttest analysis, revealed different patterns between the two types of writing tasks. For the descriptive essays, despite the improvements in overall complexity, complexity by subordination, and fluency with a large effect size (r ≥ .6) (Plonsky & Oswald, 2014), no significant findings were confirmed for accuracy. In contrast, in the argumentative essays, the learners improved all the linguistic aspects but with a medium effect size (.4 ≤ r < .6).<br>Second, in the one-year investigation, the JFL learners significantly improved overall complexity, complexity by subordination, and fluency during the study period. The dynamic systems approach (Verspoor & van Dijk, 2011) also unraveled the developmental trajectories to show how different variables interacted in the two different types of writing tasks, respectively, throughout the measurement period. Although there were no statistically significant differences in grammatical accuracy measures, the process of L2 writing development showed fluctuations, demonstrating that the improvements in syntactic complexity seemed to have caused many grammatical errors temporarily. Lastly, the learners’ compositions, which were also assessed qualitatively by two native Japanese speakers in terms of readability, indicated significant improvements in communicative adequacy.<br>Finally, to investigate any changes in the learners’ beliefs toward Japanese writing before and after the task repetition, the JFL learners completed the Belief Questionnaire About Writing in Japanese (Ishibashi, 2009). In addition, to examine any changes in foreign language anxiety with a focus on Japanese writing, the learners were required to complete the second-language version of the Daly-Miller Writing Apprehension Test (Cheng, Horwitz, & Schallert, 1999). The study found that the extensive writing experience had a positive impact on the JFL learners’ confidence and willingness when writing in L2 Japanese.<br><br>