| Task repetition,as one of the task implementation variables,has attracted the attention of many scholars.In recent years,research on task repetition at home and abroad has mainly focused on L2 oral production,and research on the effects of language learners’L2 writing production has received little attention.Moreover,most of task repetition research focuses on English majors and non-English majors with relatively high English proficiency.Therefore,this study aims to investigate the effects of different types of task repetition(task repetition and procedural task repetition)on first-year Chinese middle school students’writing quality and writing complexityThis study is based on Kellogg(1996)’s cognitive writing model,Skehan(1998)’trade-off hypothesis and Swain’s output hypothesis.Two research questions will be addressed in this study:1)What are the effects of procedural and task repetition on junior high school students’writing quality?2)What are the effects of procedural and task repetition on junior high school students’writing complexity?In this study,92 junior high school students from two intact classes in a middle school in Hunan province were randomly selected as subjects.46 students in one of the intact class were randomly picked as the control group,and the other class was the experiment class,which were randomly divided into the task repetition group and the procedural repetition group,each with 23 students.Participants in the task repetition group were asked to write the exact task three times.Participants in the procedural repetition group were asked to write three different written tasks(the same topic),followed with the same procedure.The study employed a five-week experiment,participants in the experiment class need to hand in five compositions,and the control group need to hand in two compositions.A total of 322 compositions from the two classes were collected,out of which 184 compositions collected from the three groups in pretest and posttest were used for data analysisThe major findings are as follows:1)both task repetition group and procedural repetition group can significantly improve middle school students’writing quality,and task repetition has a slightly better influence on the writing quality than the procedural repetition group in the posttest 2)task repetition and the procedural repetition can only significantly improve middle school students’ lexical complexity(TTR).The writing syntactic complexity in terms of words per T-unit(W/T)and words per clause(W/C)also showed slight improvement in the posttest,but the effect of both task and procedural repetition on syntactic complexity is not significantThese findings indicate that task repetition is as beneficial as procedural repetition as there were no significant differences between the groups in terms of syntactic complexity and lexical complexity.In other words,the findings do not provide strong support in favor of one task repetition treatment over the other in terms of writing complexityThe present study would be useful for language teachers to use such task repetitions in order to increase the written language productions of their learners.The limitations of this study include limited types of both task and task repetition,etc. |
