Effects Of L1 Thinking On Chinese Postgraduate Students' L2 Writing

The 1980s not only saw a rapid raise of the cognitive learning theory and a booming in L2 writing research, but also witnessed a revived recognition of the role of L1 thinking in SLA, especially L2 writing. However, most of the researches on the effects of L1 thinking on L2 writing were conducted on the product level, and they classified the effects of L1 use on L2 writing simply as "either positive or negative". Process-oriented researches into the effects of L1 thinking on L2 writing are rather sparse, and the few researches were conducted among college students, or middle school students. Till now, no research in home has explored the influences of L1 thinking on L2 writing process and product of Chinese postgraduate students. In view of this, the present study aims to investigate into the effects of L1 thinking on Chinese postgraduates'L2 argumentative writing under the framework of cognitive learning theory. The following three questions were addressed in this paper:1) What is the relationship between L2 proficiency and the amount of L1 use in the L2 writing process?2) What effects does L1 thinking exert on the quality of L2 writing?3) What factors trigger the involvement of L1 thinking in L2 writing process? And what attitudes do postgraduates hold towards their L1 use in L2 writing process?Through the combined application of think-aloud method, pretest survey, retrospective interview and post writing questionnaire, the present study looked into the L1 use in the L2 writing process of 29 postgraduate students from Lanzhou University. Firstly, pretest survey was handed out to find out the L2 writing habits the postgraduates, then 38 students of both English major and non-English major were chosen on the voluntary base to participate in the individual think-aloud training, and 29 of them who have finished all the practices and proved themselves qualified for the think-aloud method were invited to take part in the major composing-aloud experiment, retrospective interview and post writing questionnaire which was arranged immediately after the training session.Data were analyzed in three steps:firstly, quantitative analysis was conducted over the questionnaires to inquire into students'writing habits and their attitudes towards L1 use in L2 writing process. Then the think-aloud protocols were transcribed and then analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The number of Chinese and English words was counted and the percentage of Chinese words was computed to measure the amount of L1 thinking in L2 writing. Then, the writing process was classified into five categories and the percentage of L1 thinking distributed in each category was figured out in order to find out under what context the lower and higher L2 proficiency groups relied on L1 thinking respectively and the correlation between L2 proficiency and the amount of L1 use in L2 writing process. Correlation analysis was conducted between the composition scores and the amount of L1 thinking to probe into the effects of LI thinking on the quality of the L2 writing.Three major findings were yielded as follows:1) L2 proficiency is negatively correlated to the total quantity of L1 thinking adopted in L2 writing. However, L1 thinking used in five categories of composing activities doesn't necessarily decrease with the development of L2 proficiency.2) L1 thinking exerts negative effect on the general quality of L2 writing. However, L1 thinking adopted in five individual composing activities exerts various effects on the general quality of L2 writing and breakdown scores.3) Most of the students hold a positive attitude towards their L1 use in L2 writing process, viewing that L1 use can facilitate the L2 writing. In addition, data collected from the interview suggest that reasons for L1 use in L2 writing could be diversified.These findings challenge the traditional "either positive or negative" assumption about the role of L1 thinking in L2 writing, and therefore are of high theoretical, pedagogical and practical values. Being small-sample-sized and explorative in nature, the above mentioned research findings of the present study are hoped to supplement previous researches as well as to serve as a hypothesis for future L1 influence related researches.