The EFL Writers' Pausing Behavior In Online Narrative Text Production

The working memory model of writing postulates that written language production,as a complex cognitive task,draws on a limited pool of attentional resources within human working memory.If the to-be-needed resources exceed capacity limitations of working memory,writers are likely to make pauses as a strategy to free up attentional resources.Built upon the working memory model,this study takes the pause as a window to gain insights into covert cognitive processes of L2 writing and the problems EFL writers encounter during text production.The ubiquitous computers as writing instrument and the advance of computer keystroke logging programs in the last two decades have dramatically pushed the frontiers of writing research ahead.Using Inputlog 7.0 to record the writing process of 108 Chinese EFL writers in a narrative writing task,this study explored L2 writers'pausing behavior at both micro and macro levels as it unfolded in real time and how the pausing patterns interact with text quality.40 participants were interviewed for what triggers particular pauses in computer-assisted narrative text production.The results of quantitative data analysis suggest that the distribution of pauses was influenced by hierarchical structure of the text,showing a general tendency that pause duration increases as the linguistic unit level increases.The pause patterns at different levels of linguistic units reflect a hierarchy of the internal organization of plans and knowledge representations.In particular,longer pauses indicate higher-level conceptual planning,while shorter ones are more related to translating processes in writing.By frequently making short pauses at lexical levels throughout the composing stage,EFL writers spent an inordinate amount of time on linguistic concerns such as lexical selection and revisions,but they devoted significantly less attention to finalizing a text.Text quality was found to correlate positively with before-paragraphs pause frequency and duration,but negatively with word-internal number of pauses.The results of qualitative data analysis reveal that in computer-assisted narrative writing L2 writers;pausing behavior was mainly due to the lack of an internalized script for English narration,L1 lexical interference,word processing comfort and unautomatized typing.All these findings boil down to the fact that extremely resource-demanding translating processes exacerbate EFL writers' cognitive load in online narrative text production,which severely compromises higher-level planning processes and the overall writing performance as a consequence.EFL writers may benefit from effective management of writing processes and deliberate practice specific to different genres of text,which would compensate for potential cognitive overload during writing process.