A Longitudinal Study On L2 Writing Development Of Chinese English Majors From The Perspective Of Dynamic Systems Theory

Writing is an important productive skill in L2 teaching process.Writing research has attracted much more attention from scholars in recent years.Nonetheless,the text analysis and group average value are the focus of researchers,with few studies having been conducted to describe the writing development of an individual learner.Recently,Dynamic Systems Theory originated from natural science has an impact on the linear mode of language development,which brings a new perspective for the study of language acquisition.From this perspective,language is a dynamic system,while language development is also a nonlinear and dynamic development process,influenced by various factors.With the Dynamic Systems Theory as the theoretical framework,this study,through the investigation of accuracy,complexity and fluency,aimed to explore the following questions: 1)what are the individual characteristics of changes in L2 written English of the participants during the given period of time? 2)What are the group characteristics of changes in L2 written English of the participants during the given period of time? 3)What are the influencing factors towards the changes in their written English?This study selected three first-year English majors from Qingdao University of Science and Technology,and both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted.The instruments in this study include the time-limited TEM-4 compositions and interview.Time-limited composition is collected monthly and collectively,and SPSS17.0 and antconc are used to analyze the data.Then all the three participants are asked to participate in the interview,with the hope to find the influencing factors towards the changes in their written English.The results indicate that: 1)Individual developmental trajectory in L2 writing does not develop in a linear manner towards the target language,displaying dynamic and non-linearity.Individual learners show different changes at separate time,with progress and regress at certain points.There are inter-individual variations.Some develop steadily,and some have greater fluctuations;also,there are intra-individual variations.There exists a competitive and supportive relationship among the subsystems within an individual.2)Syntactic complexity,lexical complexity,accuracy and fluency in the average of the three participants do not develop in a linear manner towards the target language.Group data displays a slower and stable process and is different from that of any individual.3)Influencing factors include internal and external factors.Internal causes include motivation,personal interest,language aptitude,learning strategy and anxiety.L2 learning environment,teacher feedback and the length of L2 learning are the main external factors that lead to these changes.All those factors interact with each other to promote the development of complexity,accuracy and fluency in the development of L2 writing development.