Effects Of Task Frequency On Grammatical Errors In L2 Writing

Frequency effects have become a heated topic in second language acquisition(SLA).In studies of the output task,many focused on task frequency effects on oral production while little research concentrated on the effects on writing.Based on Dynamic Systems Theory(DST),this thesis investigates task frequency effects on Chinese university-level English learners' self-revision of grammatical errors.Besides,this study pays attention to the impact of L2 proficiency on students' self-revision of grammatical errors in repeated writing.Twenty-five English sophomores(high achievers)and twenty-four non-English sophomores(low achievers)participated in the research and completed a reading-to-write task three times in three consecutive weeks with an interval of one week.The current study utilized both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis,combined with related research,and made conclusions as follows:Among the three writing practices of an L2 reading-to-write task,task frequency did not make a significant difference on students' self-revision of general grammatical error types,but it reduced learners' errors in the latter two drafts compared with those in the first draft.Grammatical errors demonstrated a reducing tendency.In addition,task frequency did not affect students'self-revision of specific grammatical error types significantly.However,some error types manifested significance in pairwise comparisons.Objective clause error showed a significant change between the last two trials and article error presented marginal significance between the first and third trials.Additionally,L2 proficiency did not influence students' intra-group self-revision of general grammatical error types significantly among the three writing practices,but two groups exhibited similarities and differences.Both groups displayed a declining trend in grammatical functor error.High achievers made fewer and fewer grammatical errors while low achievers performed best at the second trial.It is also found that L2 proficiency did not exert significant influence on participants' intra-group revisions of specific grammatical error types among the three pieces of writing,but pairwise comparisons revealed that the error numbers of some grammatical types changed significantly.High achievers saw a significant alteration of objective clause error between the last two drafts and their article error manifested significant change between the first and the last practices.Low achievers' attributive clause error changed significantly between the first two trials.This investigation embraces implications for theory development and pedagogy.Theoretically,it adopted some concepts of DST to expound on L2 learners'self-revision of grammatical errors and embodied and testified these concepts in L2 writing,which can develop DST to some extent.By combining task frequency with the concepts,it could set a theoretical foundation for studies connected with frequency effects.Pedagogically,this research could offer one more empirical study for L2 writing teaching and advises L2 teachers to pay more attention to frequency,to take advantage of task frequency to assist learners in realizing the gap between their expressions and the exemplars,and to guide learners to use resources wisely so as to cultivate their self-revision awareness of grammatical errors and improve their self-revision ability in L2 writing.