A Study On The Impact Of Frequency On Language Performance In Reading-to-write Tasks

Frequency was welcomed when behaviorism was prevalent. Then it faded out under the influence of nativism. In recent years, its status has been reestablished in the field of SLA. In order to confirm whether frequency has an influence on language learning,a lot of empirical studies have been conducted abroad. Similar domestic studies have also been carried out in recent years. Studies have achieved consensus on the fact that frequency has a significant effect on fluency, but the impacts of frequency on accuracy and complexity are quite controversial. Also, some scholars argue that though frequency has some effects on language learning, other factors can exert influence too, taking L2 proficiency as an example. Zhou and Huang (2015) prove that the impact of frequency varies with L2 proficiency. Nevertheless,since there are not so many similar domestic studies,it is still doubted whether L2 proficiency influences the impact of frequency or not. Therefore, based on results of previous studies at home and abroad, this thesis mainly discusses the following questions: (1) Whether frequency has a significant impact on accuracy of writing; (2) Whether fluency is significantly affected by frequency; (3) Whether frequency exerts great influence over complexity; (4) Whether the impact of frequency varies with L2 proficiency.Thirty-two junior students coming from an English major class took part in the present research. Research methods included an experiment and an interview. The whole experiment lasted for three weeks. Participants were asked to complete a same reading-to-write task in each week. After the experiment, an interview was conducted. Interviewees included three students in high-level group and three students in low-level group. These two groups were divided according to scores of the final exam. The interview enabled the researcher to understand the impact of frequency more and better. Finally, all data were calculated, analyzed and discussed. Results are as follows: (1) Accuracy, fluency and lexical diversity are all significantly influenced by frequency, but frequency has no significant impacts on syntactic complexity; (2) The impact of frequency on language performance varies with L2 proficiency.It exerts great influence on accuracy in both high-level group and low-level group. But participants in high-level group make more progress than those in low-level group.Furthermore, frequency has significant effects on fluency in high-level group, but it exerts no significant influence on fluency in low-level group. In the end, frequency exerts great influence on syntactic complexity in low-level group, but it has no significant effects on that in high-level group. And the impact of frequency on lexical diversity in low-level group is not significant. However, frequency has a significant effect on lexical diversity in high-level group.Frequency has some influences on language performance probably because it concerns the allocation of attentional resources. Besides, since L2 proficiency exerts influence over the efficiency of the allocation of attentional resources and over the speed of automaticity, the impact of frequency on language performance may vary with different L2 proficiency. To some extent, the present study proves that frequency influences language learning, and the impact varies according to different L2 proficiency.