Effect of the Comparative Continuation on L2 Writing Performance

Abstract

This study is a follow-up study of the continuation task, aiming to investigate the long-term alignment effects of the comparative continuation on L2 writing performance. The research lasted for a period of 16 weeks and employed a pretest-treatment-posttest research design. Two comparable groups of fifty-five Chinese undergraduate EFL learners participated. Both groups were assigned the same writing tasks i.e. writing an argument essay of the same topic within 30 minutes. One group was given an input text with comparative ideas before writing, while another group did not have any reading materials. After 8-week treatment, both groups received a posttest, in which the data were compared and analyzed with those of pretest. Results showed that (i) the comparative continuation task resulted in greater improvement in EFL learners’ writing performance than topic-writing task. (ii) the comparative continuation task was superior to the topic-writing task in incurring less meaning-based errors, but there was no difference in form-based errors between the two groups. The results can provide some enlightenment for teaching and research of foreign language writing.