The Effects Of Concept-maps-based Planning On Linguistic Performance In College English Writing

Planning,as an important phase of task completion,has increasingly attracted researchers’ attention since the 1980 s.Nevertheless,most of the studies concerning planning has primarily focused on the impact of planning or the length of planning time on learners’ language production while a few studies examined what learners actually do during the planning time and explained the relationship between the specific planning behavior and learners’ language performance.Therefore,this study,starting with the training of concept mapping,attempts to investigate the influence of concept-maps-based planning on students’ linguistic performance in college English writing by using the qualitative and quantitative methods,and aims to address the following three research questions: 1)What effects does concept-maps-based planning have on L2 learners’ writing performance in terms of the writing content? 2)What effects does concept-maps-based planning have on L2 learners’ writing performance in terms of the writing organization? 3)What effects does concept-maps-based planning have on L2 learners’ writing performance in terms of the language features?Sixty-four Chinese non-English majors in the first year of college from Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics were selected as the participants who had similar English proficiency and science background from two classes.One class was the experimental group who need first be trained for utilizing concept mapping and finish two writing tasks under the individual and collaborative concept mapping condition respectively.The other class was the control group without such training and possessing the related habit,who need to fulfill the two tasks after examining the writing topic during the same time.Students’ writing texts were analyzed and typed into SPSS for further exploration.The results manifested: 1)In the aspect of writing content(score,relevance,sufficiency),concept-maps-based planning exerted an advantageous effect on the global score of writing content.The experimental group could have a higher writing content score and there were apparent differences between the experimental and control group;The writing content in the experimental group was more related to the topic and the proportion of “closely relevant” was 95.3125% while that of the control group was merely 81.25%;Also,the experimental group could apply more specific examples to elaborate on the main idea so as to make their content more sufficient.But in terms of the experimental group,individual and collaborative concept mapping made no difference in the writing content score including relevance and sufficiency.2)With regard to writing organization(score,paragraph organization,text coherence),concept-maps-based planning played an important role in improving learners’ organization score,and there was a distinct impact to be found about the mean of organization score between the control group and the experimental group;Participants across the two groups had a little difference in paragraph organization because they had the awareness to arrange the paragraphs and the degree of completeness in the organization was more than 90%;Compared with the control group,the experimental group used more various logical connectives correctly,resulting in stronger coherence and logic of essays.Nevertheless,regarding the experimental group,individual and collaborative concept mapping made no disparity in the organization score and paragraph organization while collaborative concept mapping facilitated learners’ usage of connectives effectively,promoting the text coherence.3)From the perspective of language features(complexity,accuracy),concept-maps-based planning exerted a great impact on learners’ syntactic complexity in the experimental group representing the significant effect in the measurement of students’ mean length of clause,while there was no remarkable influence to be found in lexical complexity and linguistic accuracy.Besides,regarding the experimental group,individual and collaborative concept mapping had no influence on lexical complexity and linguistic accuracy,however,individual concept mapping exerted a beneficial effect on subjects’ dependent clauses of T-unit.This study demonstrated that concept-maps-based planning exerted a remarkable influence on learners’ writing performance,which provided practical significance for instructors’ writing teaching and students’ English learning concerning pre-writing planning.However,given the limited research sample,it is expected that future studies can make further exploration based on this research.