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L2 writing development through two types of writing task repetition

  • Tatsushi Fukunaga ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: December 23, 2021

Abstract

This study investigated whether any remarkable effects emerge in terms of overall complexity, complexity by subordination, accuracy, and fluency in two types of writing task repetition during a single academic semester (16 weeks). The Cognition Hypothesis states that tasks involving different cognitive demands will lead to different L2 output. Thus, this study explored whether any significant differences existed between two task types: descriptive and argumentative essays. The results revealed different patterns in the two types of writing tasks. For the descriptive essays, despite the improvements in overall complexity, complexity by subordination, and fluency with a large effect size, no significant findings were confirmed for accuracy. In contrast, in the argumentative essays, the learners improved all the linguistic aspects, but with a medium effect size. This study also unraveled developmental trajectories to demonstrate how different variables interacted in the two different types of writing tasks throughout the measurement period.


Corresponding author: Tatsushi Fukunaga, Independent Researcher, Shizuoka, Japan, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

It should be noted that this manuscript is part of my doctoral dissertation (Fukunaga 2019), and that a portion of this manuscript was previously published as conference proceedings entitled ‘L2 writing development in intermediate college-level Japanese-as-a-foreign-language classrooms’ in TAKING IT TO TASK Special Issue: TBLT in Asia 2018 Conference Proceedings. I would also like to express my deepest gratitude to the editor-in-chief of IRAL, Dr. Xuesong Gao, and the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions on my manuscript.

Appendix A

Table A1:

Task instructions.

Table A2:

Descriptive essay topics.

Table A3:

Argumentative essay topics.

Appendix B: A sample essay

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Received: 2021-05-05
Accepted: 2021-11-24
Published Online: 2021-12-23
Published in Print: 2023-09-26

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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