A Study On L1 Involvement In Senior High School Students’ EFL Composing Process

Listening, speaking, reading and writing are four important perspectives in the field of second language acquisition(SLA). Among them, writing, as an output activity, is considered as an important criterion to measure foreign language learners’ comprehensive proficiency. At the early stage of learning a foreign language, foreign language learners of different levels tend to refer to their first language(Ll) to acquire the target language in all aspects, including writing. With respect to writing, this composing process is composed of many individual activities, covering understanding the task, organizing the structure, forming the content and revising. As for foreign language learners, how do they refer to their L1 in the whole foreign language writing process?As an empirical study, this paper, through multiple data collection such as questionnaires, think-aloud protocols of six senior high school learners’English writings as well as the retrospective interviews, aiming to find out L1 involvement of Chinese senior high school foreign language learners’foreign language writing process, tries to find answers to the following five research questions. Firstly, do Chinese EFL high school level learners apply their L1 to EFL writing process? If yes, how much? Secondly, how do they use L1 in different writing steps? Thirdly, how does L1 involvement vary with the development of learners’foreign language proficiency? Fourthly, what is the relationship between L1 involvement and the quality of foreign language writing? In addition, in what aspects do foreign language learners tend to apply L1 in the course of foreign language writing?After organizing and analyzing the collected data, the following conclusions can be drawn. Firstly, foreign language writing process is a bilingual event. Secondly, the amount of L1 use differs in various thinking activities, among which L1 is vastly used in the task-understanding and structure-organizing activities. Thirdly, with the development of learners’foreign language proficiency, the amount of LI use decreases in general. Fourthly, the higher the foreign language writing quality is, the less L1 is involved. Finally, when considering the writing content and notional words, especially nouns and verbs, foreign language learners of senior high school incline to refer to L1. It is also clear that the role of L1 is very complex, which can not be simply described as "positive" or "negative". L1 plays different roles in various thinking activities. Therefore, it is strongly recommended that teachers should guide their students when to refer to L1 and when to use foreign language directly in teaching writing.