This investigation consisted of two studies related to a timed-writing task. The first study was an investigation of the effect of three pre-tasks on the quality of timed-writing focusing on five variables: syntactic complexity, writing fluency, lexical diversity, content, and comprehensibility. The second study concerned the longitudinal effect of engaging in timed-writing on the development of syntactic complexity, writing fluency, and lexical diversity.The participants were 84 university students studying English at a university in Japan in which the timed-writing task was implemented as a part of class activity for over nine months. The study adopted a Latin squares design and participants in the experimental group completed 12-minute timed-writing tasks with three pre-task conditions: outlining, oral rehearsal, and reading. For the outlining condition, the participants completed 5 minutes of individual planning before completing the timed-writing task. For the oral rehearsal pre-task, they rehearsed the plan they completed during the planning session orally in pairs before completing the timed-writing task. For the reading pre-task, the participants read an article related to the timed-writing topic before the planning and timed-reading sessions. Of 18 timed-writing sessions, the participants had chance to engage in each of the three pre-tasks six times, and the texts written at Time 1, Time 3, Time 4, and Time 6 were used as data. The participants in the comparison group only took the pretest and posttests. The pretest was conducted and before the intervention session, Posttest 1 was conducted after three months, and Posttest 2 was conducted nine months after the intervention period.
The first phase of Study 1 was focused on the analysis of the quantitative data. To compare the effect of three pre-tasks on five variables—syntactic complexity, writing fluency, lexical diversity, content, and comprehensibility—the texts were converted to quantitative data using text analysis software that made the data ready for statistical analysis. The texts were scored by raters for content and comprehensibility and used for analysis.
The second phase of Study 1 was focused on the analysis of the qualitative data. Based on the findings from the quantitative data, stimulated recalls were conducted with three students. The purpose of these sessions was to examine what the participants did during the pre-task and planning sessions and how their thinking affected the quality of their final timed-writing products. The post-course questionnaire and additional text analyses were also conducted to supplement the findings of the quantitative data.
Study 2 concerned the longitudinal effect of implementing the timed-writing tasks on the development of syntactic complexity, writing fluency, and lexical diversity. The pretest and two posttests the participants in the experimental group and comparison group completed were compared.
The results revealed that none of the three pre-tasks impacted the syntactic complexity, writing fluency, lexical diversity, content, and comprehensibility measures of the immediate writing task to a statistically significant degree. One possible reason is the participants’ English proficiency level. As suggested in a previous study by Johnson et al. (2012), the participants’ English proficiency must reach a certain level in order to benefit from a pre-task that reduces the working memory burden. The participants in this study were CEFR A2 level, which is categorized as a basic language user, so their English proficiency was perhaps not developed enough to fully benefit from the pre-tasks.
The results of the questionnaire indicated that nearly 50% of the participants found reading pre-task most helpful because it was effective in terms of idea generation and learning vocabulary and grammar. Their comments were supported by the descriptive statistics of content and lexical diversity scores, which outperformed outlining group. About 40% of the participants found oral rehearsal was most helpful because it was effective for idea generation and organizing the idea. However, the comments included both positive and negative ones. How much they can benefit from oral rehearsal pre-task is more influenced by individual differences compared with other two pre-tasks. Although some participants found outlining task useful, only 10% of the participants found it was most effective.
Regarding the longitudinal effect of implementing the timed-writing activity, the current study showed that it had a significant effect on developing writing fluency. After continuing timed-writing activities for nine months, greater gains were observed for the experimental group than for the comparison group. For syntactic complexity and lexical diversity, there only significant difference between the pretest and two posttests for both groups was mean length of clause. However, because the growth was significant for the experimental group and the comparison group, it was not merely the effect of timed-writing. There was no time effect or group differences on any of three lexical diversity measures. The results of the study support the developmental order of CFL measures suggested in previous studies that propose that they develop in the order of writing fluency, syntactic complexity and lexical diversity. / Applied Linguistics
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:TEMPLE/oai:scholarshare.temple.edu:20.500.12613/9519 |
| Date | 12 1900 |
| Creators | Hosoda, Naoko |
| Contributors | Beglar, David, Nemoto, Tomoko, Schaefer, Edward, Swenson, Tamara |
| Publisher | Temple University. Libraries |
| Source Sets | Temple University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation, Text |
| Format | 213 pages |
| Rights | IN COPYRIGHT- This Rights Statement can be used for an Item that is in copyright. Using this statement implies that the organization making this Item available has determined that the Item is in copyright and either is the rights-holder, has obtained permission from the rights-holder(s) to make their Work(s) available, or makes the Item available under an exception or limitation to copyright (including Fair Use) that entitles it to make the Item available., http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
| Relation | http://dx.doi.org/10.34944/dspace/9481, Theses and Dissertations |
Page generated in 0.0023 seconds