A Study On The Effect Of The Brainstorming Task On Lexical Richness Of L2 Written Production

Lexical richness,an important indicator of second language(L2)proficiency,is a significant construct in second language acquisition(SLA)and L2 writing studies.The traditional product-oriented method is still prevailing in the teaching of L2 writing in China which constrains students' L2 writing proficiency development.Although some scholars have examined the relationship between pre-writing strategies and overall writing quality,the relevant empirical study which explores the effect of the pre-writing strategy on L2 written lexical richness is inadequate.In view of all this,this study has selected brainstorming as the pre-writing strategy in L2 writing,focusing on the effect of brainstorming on lexical richness in second language writing and students' attitudes towards the relationship between the two.The study was underpinned by a multi-method approach,involving the writing teaching experiment,participant interviews and questionnaires.The chosen subjects were 60 non-English major sophomores with 30 students in each class from a University of Jiangxi.Before the experiment,two classes were appointed to complete the same writing task.The scoring pattern of rating the essays from 0 to 25(25 for the strongest and 0 for weakest).The mean scores of the pre-test were 17.63 and 18.2.p=0.422>0.05,which suggested the two natural classes were at a similar writing level at the beginning of the experiment.One was chosen as the experimental class(EG),and the other was the control class(CG).In the course of the experiment,the subjects of the two classes were asked to write an essay with the same topic monthly,so a total of 240 essays were collected after a semester.The two classes were taught by the same teacher.The only existed difference was that the control class followed the traditional product-based approach in the experiment,while the experimental class exerted the brainstorming task as the pre-writing strategy.After the experiment,all the subjects were required to write another given-topic composition as the post-test.The researcher utilized 25 indexes to calculate the sixty post-test compositions' lexical richness through SPSS 16.0.Ultimately,follow-up interviews and questionnaires were also served the data to analyze the effect and perceptions of the brainstorming task on the L2 written lexical richness.The study reached two major findings: as for the first question,the results showed significant differences existed between the EG and CG in terms of lexical sophistication and lexical variation.Compared with CG,EG students tend to use more unusual and sophisticated words and phrases.Moreover,EG students repeated less same words than CG in their writing.Therefore,EG students generally had a higher value than CG students in the two dimensions.However,no significant difference(p=0.581 > 0.05)could be seen in lexical density between these two groups.This may due to the reason that lexical density generally means the percentage of content words to the total number of words.Although EG students wrote more content words than CG students,their writing length was also longer.As for the second research question,interviews and questionnaires showed that the majority of the students were in favor of the brainstorming task as the pre-writing strategy,and they agreed on the view that brainstorming exerted the positive effect on their written lexical richness,along with the writing quality.Practical implications for pedagogy were also proposed.First and foremost,the results enrich the research on lexical use in writing,which contributes to raising the awareness of the importance of lexical use for Chinese teachers and students.Secondly,the study confirms the positive effect of the brainstorming task on lexical richness,which encourages instructors to use brainstorming in the teaching of L2 writing.Besides,students' lexical richness is well developed in the teaching of L2 writing as well as their writing quality,which helps writing instructors recognize the potential value of the brainstorming task,whose functions are to help students better understand the topic and use more advanced words.Last but not least,the findings of this study can be viewed as a proposal for curriculum developers to implement the brainstorming task as a pre-writing strategy in writing class.