The Effects Of Frequency On L2 Reading-to-Write Tasks

This thesis explores the effects of frequency on L2 reading-to-write tasks. Altogether, twenty-seven students were involved in this study and they were university-level English majors in China. They were required to finish an argumentative writing task after reading two source texts and to repeat the same reading-to-write task three times without any change of the reading materials and the writing topic.Quantitative and qualitative analyses of students’ texts and interviews yielded the following major findings:First, on the whole, students’writing improved in terms of accuracy, fluency and complexity (except syntactic complexity) as the task repeated. However, the improvement was rather complex. Fluency and lexical complexity gained a significant improvement at the second time, but no significant improvement was found at the third time. Accuracy had a rather surprising pattern. It had a slight decrease at the second time, though it showed no significant difference from that of the first time. However, accuracy improved sharply at the third time with a significant effect.Second, mere repetition of writing task could not result in any improvement in text structure in a short period. Slight changes could be detected between the three writings in terms of structure at the essay level and paragraph level but without any statistical significance. In other words, the performance of the three writings as regarding text structure was quite similar.In the last place, frequency proved to be conducive to the improvement on the writing content measured by the development of argument. The students performed increasingly better with more practices as indicated by the scores they got. The improvement on argument development between the first time and the second time was observed significantly and a steady increase was found between the second time and the third time.This study has both theoretical and pedagogical implications. Theoretically, it enhances the understanding of frequency effects on reading-to-write tasks by providing a whole picture of how various language aspects change under the influence of frequency. Pedagogically, it provides empirical evidence for teachers to realize the importance of frequency effects and thus integrate the method into their teaching.