Effects Of L2Proficiency And Task Difficulty On L2Summary Writing Quality

Writing as one of the most difficult parts in second language teaching hasattracted considerable attention of language researchers. Recently, summary writing incombination with reading material, has become a very important research topic. Mostprevious studies explored the effects of one or two factors on a single dimension ofL2summary writing, with interaction effects largely ignored, whereas little researchwas conducted on how various factors affected the different dimensions of L2summry writing. Therefore, this current study aims to investigate the effects oflanguage proficiency and task difficulty on L2learners’ different dimensions ofsummary writing. It addresses the following research questions:1. Do language proficiency and task difficulty influence the summariness of L2summary writing?1) Do language proficiency and task difficulty each influence the summarinessof L2summary writing?2) Do language proficiency and task difficulty have any interaction for thesummariness of L2summary writing?2. Do language proficiency and task difficulty influence the information irrelevancyof L2summary writing?1) Do language proficiency and task difficulty each influence the informationirrelevancy of L2summary writing?2) Do language proficiency and task difficulty have any interaction for theinformation irrelevancy of L2summary writing?3. Do language proficiency and task difficulty influence the informationredundancy of L2summary writing?1) Do language proficiency and task difficulty each influence the informationredundancy of L2summary writing?2) Do language proficiency and task difficulty have any interaction for the information redundancy of L2summary writing?4. Do language proficiency and task difficulty influence the accuracy of L2summary writing?1) Do language proficiency and task difficulty each influence the accuracy ofL2summary writing?2) Do language proficiency and task difficulty have any interaction for theaccuracy of L2summary writing?This study was a2(language proficiency)×2(task difficulty) factorial design.Language proficiency was divided into high and low proficiency levels, which wasmeasured by English proficiency test. There are two task difficulty involved in theresearch. One is summary writing with key-word directions, and the other is summarywriting without direction.60non-English majors came from the two intact classes of Nanjing Universityof Technology. All the subjects took part in the English proficiency test during theirregular English classes. The same subjects participated in the L2summary writing test.Two kinds of task difficulty among two proficiency groups were randomly distributedfrom the researcher’s blocking. The valid data from59subjects were used for furtheranalysis.In this study, language proficiency was a between-subjects variable, and taskdifficulty was also a between-subjects variable. Four ANOVAs were conducted toanswer the following research questions. The major findings are shown as follows:1. Task difficulty has a significant effect on the summariness of summary writing,while language proficiency does not. Moreover, the task difficulty has a mediumeffect size on the summariness of summary writing(η2=0.096). The subjects whowrote summaries with direction given did better than those without key-worddirection given. There is no significant interaction between language proficiency andtask difficulty (F=.004, p>.05).2. Language proficiency has a main effect on L2learners’ informationirrelevancy of L2summary writing, and effect size is large (η2=.184). But task difficulty does not have a main effect on EFL learners’ information irrelevancy of L2summary writing. These results show that high proficiency group did worse than lowproficiency group. There is no significant interaction between two independentvariables (F=.149, p>.05).3. Language proficiency has a significant effect on L2learners’ informationredundancy of L2summary writing, but task difficulty does not (η2=.242). Languageproficiency has a very strong effect size on the information redundancy of L2summary writing, illustrating that the performance of the high proficiency group isbetter than that of the low proficiency group as language proficiency improves. Thereis no interaction between language proficiency and task difficulty (F=.118, p>.05).4. Language proficiency has a main effect on summary writing accuracy of L2summary writing, but task difficulty does not. The findings show that better thesubjects are, stronger the L2summary writing accuracy is. There is no interactionbetween language proficiency and task difficulty (F=1.997, p=.165).On the whole, this study indicated that language proficiency has a positiveeffect on L2summary writing quality. Meanwhile, it also has crucial pedagogicalimplications. On one hand, both high proficiency and low proficiency groupshave problems, but problems are different. L2teachers are supposed to givedifferent ways according to students’ language proficiency levels. The studentswho are placed in high proficiency need to learn the requirements of L2summarywriting, avoiding making comments. As for low proficiency students, teachersshould guide them to distinguish main content from the text. On the other hand,teachers are expected to give more practice and training on this kind of L2summary writing which combines writing with reading on a basis of traditionalteaching, which develops the second writing teaching in reverse.