L1Use In The L2Composing Process: An Exploratory Study Of Six Postgraduate English Majors

This paper reports an exploratory study of six postgraduate English majorstowards L1(first language) use in the L2(second language) composing processthrough think-aloud methodology, questionnaires and retrospective interviews. Thesix L2writers were asked to compose aloud a writing task and the whole process wasaudio recorded and transcribed. The present study aims to find out the proportions andpurposes of L1use in the L2composing process by postgraduate English majors andthe difference of L1use between narrative and argumentative writings and also toexplore the relations between the L1use and writing results.Analysis of these think-aloud protocols revealed that the postgraduate Englishmajors adopted both Chinese and English during L2composing process (32.6%). Theproportion and purposes of L1use varied with individual composing activities.During the whole composing process, process-controlling accounted for the least(0.8%)，while text-generating accounted for the most (64.8%). However,77%of thethink-aloud protocols in process-controlling involved Chinese, followed by ideagenerating (66%) and idea organizing (61%)，then task examining (44.6%) and thesmallest percentage of Chinese was used to generate the text (16.1%). The writingtask in this present study required both narrative and argumentative writing types.Analysis of the two writing parts showed that no significant difference existed in theL1use between narrative and argumentative by these participants. After analyzing thewriting results graded by two experienced university teachers of English, nosignificant correlations were found between the L1use and the English writingresults.