A Longitudinal Study Of Chinese English Majors' L2 Written Language Development Under The Influence Of A Reformed Curriculum

As an essential element of second language competence,writing ability has been a hot issue in substantial research in the field of SLA.On the one hand,language itself is multidimensional,multifaceted and thus complicated.On the other hand,many factors,such as,individual differences,instructional intervention,learning strategies and so on so forth,exert an influence on the development of L2 writing.As a result,consistent findings have not been generated;and there are mixed opinions over the interactional relationships across different dimensions of L2 writing.Therefore,more studies on L2 writing development are still needed.Generally speaking,a majority of the existing studies on L2 writing development opt for the cross-sectional design which is liable to impair the validity of the research findings because the inter-subjects differences may be ignored in cross-sectional design.Within the small number of longitudinal studies,most of them employ case studies or feature in a comparatively short observational period and thus the generalizability will be jeopardized.What's more,a lot of research disassociates research from instructional treatment,which may be detrimental to the practical value of the research itself.In addition,some research adopts non-equated tests which cannot be used as robust instruments to measure the longitudinal improvement in learner proficiency.Therefore,in order to guarantee the reliability and also the validity of the research findings,these shortcomings should be avoided or overcome.Based on a good knowledge of the limitations in the previous research,the current study adopts the longitudinal research design which traces the change in learners' written language over four years.The participants in this research are all undergraduates majoring in English and they are selected from two natural classes at a key Chinese university.One class receiving the reformed curriculum functions as the experimental class,and the other class receiving the traditional syllabus is chosen as the control class.37 learners(19 learners from the experimental class and 18 learners from the control class)take part in the four equated writing tests within their four academic years and therefore there are totally 148 writing samples are analyzed.Inorder to keep consistency with the previous studies and to ensure comparability across research,the current study adopts linguistic measures that are employed by most existing research.They are EFT/T and E/T for accuracy;W and W/T for fluency;RC/DC and W/C for complexity;CTTR and VOCD-D for lexical diversity;and WTB/W for lexical sophistication.The current research has generated the following findings.Firstly,the inter-group comparison turns out that the reformed curriculum is effective in improving learners' L2 writing performance in terms of accuracy,fluency,complexity and lexical sophistication.Secondly,the intra-group investigation indicates that learners have gained significant improvement in all the dimensions concerned,and also it shows that progressions and regressions are interwoven in the L2 writing developmental route.Thirdly,no competitive relation is detected between any two dimensions,which to a considerable extent justifies Towell's psycholinguistic model and Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis.Fourthly,learners have made marked progress in terms of the global discourse structure and there exists dissociation between the global text quality and the local linguistic expression.Last but not least,compared to the subordination measures(C/T and DC/C),W/C and RC/DC are more sensitive to the change of complexity.However,for some uncontrollable reasons,the current research also has some limitations.Firstly,the participants should include low and intermediate learners rather than merely advanced learners to extend the effectiveness of the reformed curriculum.Secondly,some linguistic measures may not be appropriate.For example,the statistical analyses indicate that W/T meant to measure fluency is more suitable to be used as measures for complexity.Thirdly,oral output should also be collected to fully investigate the effectiveness of the reformed curriculum.Last but not least,the current research does not explore the factors,such as,learning strategies,working memory,learning interest and so on,which are likely to mediate the effect of the reformed curriculum.