A Study Of The Effects Of Topic Familiarity On Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing

Research into task-based language teaching (TBLT) has attracted attention from researchers, educators as well as administrative officers. The past several decades has witnessed fast development in TBLT research in at least three areas, task characteristics (task structure, objectivity of tasks, topic familiarity), task conditions (planning, repetition) and learners (proficiency, motivation and gender). Research on topic familiarity in second language writing seems to be underrepresented in previous literature. Therefore, the present study intends to examine the effects of topic familiarity on Chinese EFL learners’ writing performance.This study is empirical in nature. Twenty-four EFL participants majoring in Computer Science were assigned to three groups based on their English proficiency and were asked to perform two writing tasks of different familiarity according to their rating through a questionnaire. All participants’essays were evaluated in terms of content, fluency, accuracy, complexity and lexis to examine how topic familiarity affected their writing performance. Interview was also employed to explain some findings in the empirical study, and to examine participants’ attitudes towards tasks of different familiarity and psychological activities during writing. Analysis of variance (ANOVA), t-test and Tukey post-hoc test in SPSS 18.0 were conducted for statistical analysis.Results show that topic familiarity exerts significant influences on learners’writing performance in fluency, accuracy, lexis and complexity, but not in syntactic complexity and content coverage. The effect sizes signal that topic familiarity works most powerfully in fluency and lexis, and least magnificently in complexity. Significant differences in learners’writing product in fluency, accuracy, complexity and lexis except content coverage are also found among different proficiency groups in both familiar and unfamiliar tasks. However, topic familiarity bridges the gap between Group 2 (intermediate language proficiency level) and Group 3 (low language proficiency level) in lexical density and fluency. In addition, learners in different language proficiency groups are affected differently by topic familiarity:Learners at relatively high proficiency level are significantly influenced by topic familiarity in fluency, complexity in terms of mean T-unit length and lexis in terms of lexical density with huge effect sizes; learners at the intermediate proficiency level are greatly impacted in fluency and lexis in terms of lexical density with huge effect sizes; low proficiency level learners are significantly influenced in fluency, accuracy and lexis with huge effect sizes.Based on the findings in this study, some pedagogical implications are proposed in terms of language production testing and task sequencing. Finally, limitations of the study itself and suggestions for future study are discussed.