The Development Of Chinese High-school Students’ Second Language Writing Performance:a Case Study From The Complexity Theory Perspective

Whenever someone mentions language, the four skills: listening, speaking,reading and writing, stand out in people’ s mind. It is generally held that the masteryof the four skills equals to the mastery of a language. Thus, language teachers aresupposed to do well in the instruction of the four skills. The new National ELTCurriculum Standard for Compulsory Education also considers language skillscomposed of listening, speaking, reading and writing as a part of the foundations forthe comprehensive ability for language use. The four language skills are said tosupplement each other in language instruction, learning and daily use. Nevertheless,when the author recalls his own English learning experience, or communicates withprimary or secondary school teachers, or even reads the English compositions writtenby college students, he has the feeling that the writing part has been ignored to someextent and writing is the weak point of many English learners. Thus, the writing partcalls for more attention.In the process of searching and reading the literature on writing, the author findsthe studies can be classified into quantitative and qualitative studies, or cross-sectionaland longitudinal studies. There are a lot more quantitative and cross-sectional studies.But longitudinal studies can reflect the development of writing performance better,and qualitative studies can come into some results that cannot be revealed byquantitative data, such as the perceptions of the learners themselves.This study combines quantitative and qualitative methods together, delicatelydisplaying the development of writing performance in seven learners in their first yearin high-school through the analysis of compositions; their own perceptions of thedevelopment have also been revealed through interview.Complexity Theory in language and second language acquisition researchoriginated in the late1990s. In the recent10years, it is fairly popular. As a theorystudying complex, dynamic systems, CT recognizes the inter-individual variation andintra-individual variability among varied subsystems of language, arguing that thevariation and variability can reveal the developmental process of language in learners.Since it can well present the developmental processes of language systems andsubsystems, it is applied here as the theoretical basis for the analysis and explanationof the data. Some points in psycholinguistics, cognitive linguistics and languagetesting are also helpful in data interpretation, thus are also applied here. The findings of the study are as follows:Firstly, the development of grammatical complexity, lexical complexity, accuracyand fluency in average for the seven participants does not change toward the targetlanguage in a linear uprising manner. The four subsystems demonstrate uniquechanging processes. This is verified as being affected by both cognitive and socialfactors.Secondly, the comparison among learners within the same proficiency level andwith different proficiency levels demonstrates that there exists inter-individualvariation in writing development. The learners all develop in largely different ways inthe four subsystems: some change steadily, some shift sharply; some presentimprovement, some show backsliding, and nearly all demonstrate regression. Theanalyzing process reveals that the writing system and its subsystems present thefeatures of complex, dynamic systems.Thirdly, there exists intra-individual variability. The subsystems compete andsupport each other, and the competition and support are generally different fordifferent learners. This presents that different learners prefer to develop different partsof the four subsystems.Fourthly, this research confirms that the development of writing can be wellexplained by CT. The application of CT into the applied study of writing performancefurther verifies the theory, and validates its application value. The integration ofpoints in other theories further deepens the interpretation of the results.Fifthly, as for the learners’ perceptions of their writing development, the learnersas a whole have a good perception of their own development in grammaticalcomplexity, a partially right perception of their development in lexical complexity andaccuracy, and a relatively poor perception in terms of their development in fluency. Asfor the perception of each learner as an individual, most learners have goodperceptions of some subsystems of their writing development, but not so correctperceptions of some other subsystems; some learners even have totally wrongperceptions of some subsystems.