Yi Students’ English As A Foreign Language Writing Processing Based On Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double-Structure Theory

This article aims to explore the mental processing concerning Yi student’s EFL writing. Eleven Yi-Chinese bilinguals are recruited to take a triangulation research, which includes a thinking-aloud protocol, a questionnaire, and a semi-structured interview, employing the quantitative method and case study approach. The results show that higher-level and lower-level English writers are inclined to employ more native thinking units, i.e., Chinese and Yi thinking units, while intermediate-level English writers employ less Chinese thoughts, which indicates that English beginners employ more thoughts in retrieving lexicon, while English experts employ more thoughts in plotting the whole structure. The more proficient the writer is, the more percentage of Yi and Chinese thoughts used in the planning period, indicating that planning period has something to do with complex processing. The results, however, are not significant, which indicates that the number of thoughts which are used in planning period is also connected with idiosyncratic preferences. The positive correlation between percentage of Yi thoughts and the frequencies of Yi writing suggests that the more frequently one writes in Yi language, the more thoughts are used in the composing process of foreign language writing, which indicates that the knowledge of Yi language can be transferred to foreign language writing. The comparison of the number of learning strategies between Yi language and Chinese employed by the same participants shows that more strategies in Chinese are used flexibly than Yi language, indicating that Chinese possesses the cognitive stability and is used to solve complex problems, which implies more writing in inter-language helps improve cognitive complexity and supplies more complex cognition strategies for English writing tasks. According to frequencies of Yi writing and English proficiency, as well as the different thinking patterns of Chinese and English, the models of Yi student’s EFL writing process are recommended.