A Research On Lexical Richness And Writing Achievement In Reading-to-write Task

Since the 1960 s,scholars have studied the relationship between reading and writing,and found that reading can effectively promote writing.In recent years,reading-to-write task has been widely used in various language tests,and the teaching mode of the reading-to-write task has also attracted the attention of researchers.Vocabulary is an important cornerstone of reading and writing,and lexical richness is also one of the focuses of research.This study designed two studies,namely Study One and Study Two,to explore the influence of the reading-to-write task on lexical richness and writing achievement by using the quantitative research method.Study One was a comparative study of the writing-only task and the reading-to-write task,while Study Two was a comparative study of the difficulty of source texts in the reading-to-write task.Based on these two studies,this thesis put forward the following four research questions:1)Compared with the writing-only task,how does the reading-to-write task affect lexical richness?2)Compared with the writing-only task,how does the reading-to-write task affect writing achievement?3)How does the difficulty of source texts in the reading-to-write task affect lexical richness?4)How does the difficulty of source texts in the reading-to-write task affect writing achievement?The two studies explored the influence of the reading-to-write task on lexical richness and writing achievement from different perspectives.The total number of participants was204 non-English major postgraduates from Lanzhou Jiaotong University.This study was divided into four groups,writing-only group(writing-only task)and reading-to-write group(reading-to-write task)participated in Study One;high difficulty source text group(high difficulty source text in the reading-to-write task)and low difficulty source text group(low difficulty source text in the reading-to-write task)participated in Study Two.In addition,this thesis not only scored compositions through Jacob’s Composition Rating Scale,but also measured each dimension of lexical richness through LCA,Vocabprofile,Uber Index and so on.In the end,SPSS was used to make Independent Samples T-Test on the experimental data.The research results are as follows:Firstly,compared with the writing-only task,reading-to-write task can significantly promote lexical variation(p<0.05),lexical sophistication(p<0.05)and lexical density(p<0.05)in the compositions,and reduce the lexical errors(p<0.05).Secondly,there was significant difference in writing achievement between the two groups(p<0.05).Compared with the writing-only task,writing achievement in the reading-to-write task was higher,which indicated that the reading-to-write task could facilitate writing achievement.Thirdly,except for lexical errors(p<0.05),there was no significant difference between high difficulty source text group and low difficulty source text group in lexical variation,lexical sophistication and lexical density.About lexical errors,the compositions’ accuracy of low difficulty source text group was higher.Fourthly,there was no significant difference in writing achievement between the two groups.It was worth mentioning that the overall writing achievement and five sub achievements of low difficulty source text group were slightly better than those of high difficulty source text group.On this basis,this thesis proposes two suggestions.Firstly,in college English writing teaching,teachers can integrate reading-to-write task into their daily teaching activities in order to further enhance students’ writing ability by using the method that facilitates writing by reading.Besides,teachers should choose the appropriate source texts for writing tasks.In writing teaching,teachers should not only pay attention to students’ output of rich and diverse vocabulary,but also pay attention to students’ lexical errors.