An Empirical Study On L1 Thinking In Senior High School Students’ English Writing Process

It has been proved that the L2 writing is not a pure L2 thinking process. Writing in L2, especially at the primary stage of L2 learning, cannot avoid L1 thinking. The learners with a low L2 proficiency may rely on their L1 when they write in L2.The issues about L1 influence have been debated for several decades in SLA(second language acquisition) field, but never have reached a definite conclusion. Since the 1980’s, researchers have paid more attention to the research of L2 writing. But most of the studies compared the similarity between L1 writing and L2 writing and emphasized the commonness. There’re few studies focused on the effect of L1 on L2 writing. The conclusions are also different from each other.In the past decades, many researchers(Guo&Liu, 1997; Wen&Guo, 1998; Wang, 2004; and Li, 2006) in China carried out empirical studies on L1 using in the L2 outputting process. These studies are of great significance for the L1 using in SLA.This study carries out an empirical study on senior middle school students’ writing process and discusses the relationship between L1 thinking and L2 writing. The research may enrich the comprehension of the L1 effect, enhance the understanding of the characteristic of L2 writing and help to construct L2 writing theory.The 12 subjects of this study are from ZhenYuan tunzi middle school. The research instruments are think-aloud and interview. The think-aloud protocols are analyzed both in a quantitative and qualitative way. Firstly, L1 and L2 words in each protocol are counted and the proportion of L1 use is computed to measure the amount of L1 in L2 writing. Then, the writer’s cognitive operations were categorized into five composing activities and the proportion of L1 use in each activity was calculated to show when the writer tends to rely on L1.Then, it takes a comparison of the amount of L1 use between three groups to explore the relationship between the amount of L1 use and their L2 proficiency.The research findings are given as follows: 1)It can be seen from the proportion of L1 use in the L2 writing process that all the three groups use L1(Chinese) to think in the process of L2 writing, but the proportion of L2(English) for the subjects still accounts for most in the process of L2 writing; 2) The student writers were most likely to rely on their L1 when organizing ideas and controlling process. They relied on L1 and L2 almost equally when they were examining task. They relied more on L2 than L1 when undertaking the sentence-forming and idea-generating activities.3) The proportion of L1 use relates directly to the proficiency of L2 learning.L1 thinking in the L2 writing decreased gradually with the writer’s L2 development.