The Effects Of Self-Assessment On Chinese School EFL Students’ Register Flexibility Improvement:An Exploratory Study

The mainstream study of L2 acquisition is cognitive and emphasizes the cultivation of students’ linguistic competence,which leads to an ignorance of the study of their communicative competence improvement（Hymes,1972）,the ability to use language appropriately according to contexts（Ellis,2015）.Register flexibility as an important component of communicative competence,referring to the ability to use linguistic variants according to situational context with the awareness of what are the most appropriate for communicative purposes and interpersonal relationships（Beltran-Planques＆Querol-Julian,2018;Qin＆Uccelli,2020）has attracted increasing attention.Studies suggest register flexibility can be improved by awareness-raising（Bi,2019;Herazo,2021;Goulart,2021）.However,its effects have not been fully explored.Meanwhile,studies show that selfassessment can devote to students’ awareness-raising.To bridge the research gap,the thesis investigates the influence of the use of self-assessment rubrics brings to Chinese School EFL students’ register flexibility improvement.32 students from a middle school in Beijing take part in the experiment and 128 texts are collected for analysis.The analysis of the texts is multi-dimensional,including three levels:the lexical level（i.e.lexical diversity,including word token,type/token ratio（TTR）,and lexical density,including complex noun phrases per clause（CN/C））,syntactic level（i.e.clauses per T-unit（C/T））,and discoursal level（i.e.discourse markers）accompanied by case studies of students’ use of address terms,greetings and closings.To better understand the statistical results,3 students are invited to have interviews with the author.The analyses uncover that without any pedagogical interference,the students show proper register flexibility at the lexical and discoursal levels.At the lexical level,the students use significantly more complex noun phrases in formal registers.However,their formal and informal compositions do not differ in lexical diversity（word token and TTR）.At the syntactic level,their compositions are equally clausal.Yet,according to the means of C/T,the students’ formal compositions show a tendency to be less clausal than informal ones.At the discoursal level,87.5%of the students can use discourse markers according to the register types.The use of informal discourse markers is significantly more frequent than that of formal discourse markers.As for the effects of self-assessment rubrics,at the lexical level,the use of selfassessment rubrics has a significantly positive effect on students’ use of complex noun phrases in formal registers,but it hardly affects students’ register flexibility in terms of lexical diversity（e.g.word token and TTR）.At the syntactic level,it does not affect the students.At the discoursal level,the self-assessment rubrics can significantly improve students’ use of discourse markers according to register types.With self-assessment rubrics,students are found to correct "Hi" with "Dear" in formal registers,change address term"Dear" with informal ones "My dear friend","My bro" in informal ones.The use of new types of greetings and closings are also found in both formal and informal registers.However,the use of self-assessment rubrics brings a negative effect on students’ register flexibility on the syntactic level.By referring to the literature review and students’ interviews,we find three reasons why students’ register flexibility does not reach a statistical significance with some measures:1)implementation time of the experiment is too short;2)the students’ unwillingness to write to someone who has higher social status than them（French＆Beaulieu,2015）;3)students’lack of the knowledge on how to use register variants to realize the interpersonal differences of the registers（Schleppegrell,2018;Bi,2019）.Finally,the study offers some suggestions on pedagogical practice as well as on future research.