Exploring Senior High School Students’ Textual Borrowing Ability And Practice In Integrated Writing Tasks

How to find an accurate and effective test of second language writing ability has always been one of the main focuses in the field of language testing since it is an important criterion to measure a learner’s second language level.In recent years,the second language writing test has undergone a transition from independent writing to integrated writing.Of all the integrated writing tasks,the reading-to-write task(or textbased writing task)is a representative one and is gaining increasing popularity in second language writing.Providing students with the source text in the task is the most significant feature that distinguishes integrated writing tasks from independent ones.However,the concern of whether test-takers rely on the source texts excessively has been raised recently.The previous studies showed that only a small percentage of graduate and undergraduate students had borrowed extensively from the source materials.Nevertheless,few studies aimed at senior high school students,especially domestic ones,can be found to analyze the extent of textual borrowing.Therefore,based on the previous research about textual borrowing in the integrated writing tasks,this paper attempted to explore the following three questions:1.To what extent do students borrow source text language in the integrated writing tasks,in terms of a)amount of language borrowed,b)degree of modification,and c)attribution?2.Does students’ writing proficiency have any effect on the pattern of textual borrowing?3.Is the amount of textual borrowing related to students’ writing performance?This paper was designed to investigate the senior high school students’ ability to borrow the source texts in the integrated reading-to-write tasks.It mainly discussed the test results of two reading-to-write tasks(topics: education and technology)written by45 senior high school students with three different English proficiency levels in order to investigate the extent of textual borrowing.This study hoped to find out the extent to which senior high school students borrow from the given materials in the integrated tasks,and provide a new perspective as to how to improve senior high school students’ writing performance as well as offer some pedagogical suggestions on such kind of writing tasks.The 90 compositions presented the following findings: first,students tended to copy directly when it came to borrowing the source texts,which was slightly different from Shi’s research(2010)and Weigle and Park’s research(2012);second,similar to the previous studies(Johns and Mayes,1990;Shi,2004),students with different English proficiency levels showed the similar pattern of textual borrowing in both topics,and they all borrowed the source texts most frequently by copying them verbatim.However,the group with lower English proficiency levels borrowed more texts than the group with higher English levels either in referenced or non-referenced borrowed types;third,in accordance to previous studies,this study showed proficiency did have an effect on the amount of textual borrowing.Students with low-level English proficiency were not familiar with this kind of task,and therefore they tended to copy the source texts directly with few personal arguments.There existed a correlation between scores and textual borrowing,although it was not that statistically significant.