A Study On L2 Writing Motivation And L2 Writing Performance In The Text Continuation Task And The Picture Continuation Task

Writing motivation mainly refers to learners’ desires to accomplish a writing task.Motivation serving as an affective factor may promote learners in L2 acquisition according to the theory of affective filter hypothesis.Nevertheless,the facilitative effect of L2 writing motivation has not been thoroughly examined by scholars,and no studies have been conducted to investigate the effectiveness of different writing tasks on L2 writing motivation.Previous studies did probe into the relationship between L2 writing motivation and writing performance,but they haven’t come to a consensus for the sake of different ways to measure L2 writing motivation and writing performance.The continuation task integrating comprehension and production has been confirmed to be facilitative in L2 learning.But whether the effectiveness of the continuation task on learning can cause ensuing effect on affective factors like L2 writing motivation remains to be examined.The picture continuation task,a variant of the text continuation task,was thought to have a stronger intensity of interaction than the text continuation task for containing more than one input mode,thus having a better alignment effect and learning effect.However whether it will cause difference on the effect on L2 writing motivation between these two tasks still lacks empirical evidence.As a result,the present study aims to explore 1)the effectiveness of the text continuation tasks and the picture continuation task on L2 writing motivation,2)the difference on the effect on L2 writing motivation between the text continuation task and the picture continuation task,3)and the relationship between L2 writing motivation and L2 writing performance in the continuation task.The questions above were addressed by means of an empirical study.Totally 90 participants from a vocational college in Guangdong province were selected to take part in the experiment and they were randomly divided into three groups,namely the the topic writing group,the text continuation group and the picture continuation group.The present study was conducted in three steps: 1)a free writing test was carried out to get the English writing performance and the motivational beliefs questionnaire(MBQ)was distributed;2)the topic writing group finished two topic writing tasks,the text continuation group completed two text continuation tasks while the picture continuation group finished two picture continuation tasks;3)all the participants needed to finish the MBQ as a post-test.In the meanwhile,3 participants from each group were required to take part in the semi-structured interview.The date achieved in the semi-structured interview were functioned as a supplement of the quantitative data.One-sample t-test,independent-sample t-test and Pearson’s correlation analysis would be applied to analyze the data.Results revealed that participants in the text continuation group and in the picture continuation group showed a significantly higher writing motivation than those in the topic writing group especially in the motivational beliefs of self efficacy and attribution internal in the text continuation task whereas mastery goal,avoidance goal,self efficacy,task value,attribution internal and attribution external in the picture continuation task,indicating the effectiveness of the text continuation task and the picture continuation task on L2 writing motivation.It also showed that L2 writing motivation in the picture continuation task was significantly higher than that in the text continuation task,particularly in task value,proving a significantly greater effect of the variants of the continuation task with both the picture mode and the text mode on L2 writing motivation.L2 Writing motivation and writing performance were positively correlated in the text continuation task and they were significantly positively correlated in the picture continuation task,especially the motivational factor of self efficacy and attribution internal.The present study provided an empirical way of improving L2 learners’ writing motivation.The scaffolding mechanism and the alignment effect of the continuation task benefiting from the intensive interaction between the input material and output enhanced the cultivation of writing motivation.And the multimodal input in the picture continuation task promoted the relation of writing motivation with writing performance.