Study On Foreign Language Writing And Amount Of First Language Thinking

Native language is one of the crucial factors to affect the foreign language learning and the second language acquisition. Many studies have been conducted to investigate the functions of L1 thinking in the course of second/foreign language writing, but most of the researches focused to the final writing product rather than the writing process. And their studies aimed to explore the negative functions of L1 thinking and its interference. With regard to the study on the relationship between foreign language proficiency and extent of L1 thinking and the study on the characteristics of distribution of L1 thinking in the process of foreign language writing, a few literatures can be found out. Therefore, the present study took the perspective of this point of view, under the theoretical framework of language and thought, to examine the L1 thinking use between the English majored senior students (SE) and the non-English major freshman students (SN) during the English composing, and the purpose of the research is to answer the questions below.1. How much amount of the L1 thinking is imposed into the FL writing in the process of composing and what are the differences existed between the learners with the high English proficiency /SE and the ones with low English proficiency/ SN?2. When and what contexts would the subjects with different FL proficiency revert to L1 thinking to the English composing? And what are the distinction of L1 thinking distribution existed between SE and SN? Why?The present study firstly used questionnaire to obtain the participants' general retrospection information on English writing and L1 thinking in the course of everyday English learning, then two participants who were randomly chosen from two groups conducted think aloud English writing. All the subjects were the college students from Shaanxi Normal University (SNU) and Shaanxi University of Technology (SUT). The research instruments mainly included questionnaire, think-aloud protocols and retrospective interview. And the materials of data analysis were consisted of the result of questionnaire, protocol transcription, subjects' compositions and the note-taking of interview. Data analysis procedures had three sections .Firstly, Quantitative analysis was carried out to the questionnaire result so as to gain the information on L1 thinking in English writing between SE and SN. Secondly, the think-aloud protocols were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. And Chinese and English words in each protocol are counted and the proportion of L1 use is computed to measure the amount of L1 in the FL writing. Then, all of the L1 thinking activities were classified into five categories and the proportion of each category were figured out in terms of idea unit in order to find out what context the students relied on L1 thinking. The last section was about qualitative and quantitative analysis on distribution of L1 thinking, and a model of L1 thinking schema was constructed for the purpose of the clear and logical discussion on the differences of L1 thinking involvement between SN and SE.All of the data analyses yielded three major findings as follows:1. In the course of argumentation writing, no matter whether the learners' FL proficiency is high or low, almost a half of thinking activity relied on L1 thinking.2. FL proficiency did not result in the change on the extent of L1 thinking. It is proved that amount of L1 thinking of SE is not far less than that of SN in the course of the English writhing. The proportion of the L1 thinking between SE and SN was nearly equal (48% and 52% respectively).3. FL proficiency brought about the different distribution of L1 thinking during of the FL composing. The senior students majored English used 85 percent of L1 thinking on idea developing including idea selecting, reasoning and expressions evaluating. While the freshman who was non-English major imposed 65 percent of L1 thinking in the linguistic forms searching involved in FL equivalents seeking, reasoning and grammar correctness. With regard to category of task response, idea organizing and process controlling, FL proficiency do not lead to significant differences on the aspect of L1 thinking.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter One is a brief introduction to the research background, research questions and the significance of the study. Chapter Two is literature review, which presents the historical background against which the present study was developed and provides the empirical findings relevant to the theme of the present study. Chapter Three describes study design in detail, including the participant selection, data collection and analysis procedures. Chapter Four presents the results in response to the two research questions designated for this study and discusses possible factors leading to the results. Chapter Five is the conclusion with main findings, pedagogical implications, and limitations of this study as well as suggestions for future research.