Effects of reasoning demands triggered by genre on Chinese EFL learners' writing performance.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

Genres, having distinct communicative functions, elicit different levels of reasoning demands in writing tasks. The current study investigated the influence of cognitive complexity triggered by a seldom studied pair of genres (expository writing vs. argumentative writing) on Chinese advanced EFL learners' writing performance.

Method

A total of 76 L2 learners participated in two writing tasks: one simpler expository writing task involving fewer reasoning demands and the other more complex argumentative writing task eliciting more reasoning demands. Multiple measure indices were adopted to comprehensively reflect the differences in production dimensions between the two writing tasks, such as lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, accuracy, fluency, and cohesion

SUBMITTER: Peng C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10231673 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature