Influence Of Discourse Mode And Length On Writing Performance

EFL writing is an essential part in language tests in China. It is regarded as a useful tool to fully demonstrate one's language ability. The influence of task type and task condition on writing performance has been investigated heavily in language teaching and language testing. As for task type, the previous researches have examined different types of writing tasks classified by different criteria according to the researchers' preference. The researches on the influence of task condition mainly focus only on two conditions: playing vs. no-planning and time-constrained vs. time-unconstrained. This present study explores the influence of three discourse modes and length on Chinese students' writing performance, which is assessed by measures of complexity and accuracy.One hundred and twenty-four English-major sophomores from four classes of a university participated in this research. Two classes are required to write about 150 words for each of the three tasks (narrative, expository, argument) within twenty minutes. The other two classes are required to write about 300 words for the same three tasks within forty minutes. Then ten students are randomly chosen from each class. These twenty students who write about 150 words form Group A and the other twenty students who write about 300 words form Group B. The complexity and the accuracy of the students' written texts are measured by C/T (Clauses per T-unit) and EFC/C (Error-Free Clauses per Clause) respectively. T-tests will be performed to analyze the relationships between the variables. The significance level is at 0.05 level.When analyzing the difficulty of each task, Chen Huiyuan and Wu Xudong's model of written language production is adopted. This model consists of three parts: conceptualizer, formulator, and transcriber. By this model, the cognitive load of each task in this study is discussed and their corresponding influences on complexity and accuracy are also predicted.The findings show that both discourse mode and length do have an influence on complexity. Either in the short or the long writing condition, different discourse modes display different complexity, with the argument taskbeing associated with the greatest complexity, the expository task the least complexity and the narrative task in between. The influence of length on complexity is that with the length increase of a written text, the complexity of the written text will also increase. This is especially evident in the less difficult discourse modes like the narrative or the expository.As for their influence on accuracy, neither discourse mode nor length has much influence. The accuracy of each discourse mode doesn't always correspond negatively to its complexity in both conditions. With the length increase of a written text, the accuracy of the written text does not always decrease as expected, In all, accuracy remains stable either in different discourse modes or in different length conditions.At last, some implications of this study for language teaching and testing are also given in the last chapter.