The Influence Of Writing Frequency On Timed English Writing From The Perspective Of Cognitive Load Theory

Writing is one of the important and basic skills that English learners have tomaster. As Ding (1999), the famous scholar, puts it, writing is very important andindispensable in the process of learning English.The step of researching second language writing has never stopped and thefield is fruitful today. Learners’ written production competence, however, needsfurther improvement. Skehan (1998) proposed three dimensions to evaluate thecompetence of written production of English learners, which are fluency, accuracyand complexity. Many researchers has investigated the importance of frequency butyet there is no consistent conclusion about how the fluency, accuracy and complexityof high school English learner’s writing production will change with the increase ofwriting frequency and whether the influence on high school writers remain effectiveafter a considerable period.It is believed in cognitive load theory that the short term memory or theworking memory of language learners has a limited capacity while there is no limitfor the capacity of the long term memory, where schemata of acquired knowledge arestored. It costs less working memory capacity to process schema retrieved from longterm memory than that of novel information so that the automation of schema canhelp release one’s working memory capacity and help increase the germane cognitiveload. Effective learning takes place in the end.This thesis is based on an empirical study which consists of four writing tasks.The study is carried out to examine how writing frequency influences the writtenproduction of English learners from the perspective of cognitive load theory.Specifically, the main purpose of the study is to investigate whether the threedimensions will increase with the increase of learner’s writing frequency andwhether the changes of the three dimensions remains when the learner is engaged inthe same writing task after a considerable period of time. Forty students participated in the empirical study. They finished four writing tasks independently without anyfeedback from the teacher. Data are collected when all the tasks are finished. Withthe data collected, the fluency, accuracy and complexity of each script are analyzedand compared by SPSS(16.0). Results of the study illustrate that writing frequencycan positively influence the fluency and accuracy of learner’s written production. Itis unexpected that no statistically significant change of the complexity has beenobserved. Several reasons can explain the results, including the limitedness oflearner’s working memory capacity, the linguistic threshold and the writing habit ofsenior high school students.Based on the interpretations of the results, the author states the implications forthe teaching and evaluation of English writing. The increase of frequency willfacilitate the schema automation of several writing steps, which will cost lessworking memory thus helping release a certain amount of working memory capacityto process other information and finally improve the competence of writtenproduction. The importance of frequency should be emphasized. When the learnerwrites for three or more times, both the fluency and accuracy of learners’ writtenproduction are significantly improved. Taking into consideration the efficiency ofpractical teaching, the author suggests that an English writing task should be finishedfor three times.