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A study of Task-related writing performance and its measurements. Chen, Huiyuan Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Yunnan, China <hychenew@gmail.com>. The guiding research questions.
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A study of Task-related writing performance and its measurements Chen, Huiyuan Yunnan University of Finance and Economics, Yunnan, China <hychenew@gmail.com>
The guiding research questions • Whether different types of L2 writing tasks and conditions will affect the linguistic performance of Chinese EFL learners. And if so, in what way and why. • What linguistic features and tendency can we find in learners’ task related performance? • Can qualitative and quantitative method lend support to each other?
The tasks to be studied • Topic writing (TW) • Picture writing (PW) • Graph writing (GW) • Summary writing (SW)
The control of time condition • 30 minutes -- group A • 50 minutes -- group B
Accuracy measures • The ratio of error-free s-nodes to the total number of s-nodes (short for EFS/S or just EFS). • The number of errors in each T-unit (E/T). • The percentage of the total number of errors to the total number of words in the written text (E/W).
Complexity measures Syntactic complexity • Ratio of S-nodes per T-unit (S/T) • The number of words per T-unit (W/T). Lexical Variation • The ratio of different types of words to the total number of words or tokens (type/token or t/t). • The number of different types of word divided by the square root of twice the total number of words (t/√2W).
Fluency measures • The amount of revision to the total number of words (R/W). • The number of words per minute (W/M) • The total number of words produced in a written text (Length)
Statistical analyses • A 3-way multivariate tests with the design of 4 ×2 ×2 on 10 measures: to get a general picture of the overall effect. The results in Table 1. • One-way ANOVA to find out the effect of task types and the results in Table 4.
Table 3. Time effect on the nine dependent variables (t-test, Statistica)
Table 4. Task effect on measures of accuracy, complexity and fluency (one-way ANOVA, SPSS)
Summary of the quantitative results • For the aspect of accuracy, SW and PW were ranked higher than the other two tasks • For the aspect of syntactic complexity ( in terms of S/T), SW ranked first and GW the least • For the aspect of lexical complexity, PW and TW ranked higher than SW and GW • For the aspect of fluency (in terms of length and the production of words in time), TW and PW ranked higher than GW and SW. • In terms of the amount of revision, GW ranked the highest
Linguistic features typical of each task TW more unclear, ambiguous or awkward structures and expressions more “global errors”
PW Oral /speech form Exclamation as means of transiting ideas Personification
SW: use of strategies: Combination
Conclusion • Task difference can give rise to different performance in different ways, as a results of task requirement and use of strategies pertinent to tasks • Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are necessary and can be used to add validity to the research results as the results of one method may find support in the other
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