Implications for L2 writing instruction and L2 instruction in general

The findings of the current study have implications for L2 writing instruction and L2 instruction in general. For L2 writing instruction, the study suggests that L2 writing teachers need to help learners gain understandings of task expectations. This includes two aspects. First, L2 writing teachers can help learners develop awareness of criteria that are important for high quality writing for each task type in the eyes of readers or raters. For example, based on this study, how much text a writer is able to generate during timed writing is highly important for writing quality scores across task types; such information could be explicitly conveyed to L2

writers, and perhaps much more importantly, ways that a good length can be produced should be discussed with the learners and be practiced with. A good length does not mean writers should sacrifice clear organization, good content, coherence and so on. Some of the ways to achieve a good essay length can include providing more support and details for main ideas, doing planning before writing, and doing more free-writing on a regular basis to increase general writing

fluency. For another example, lexical sophistication, i.e., use of academic and advanced vocabulary, is found to be particularly important for writing quality scores on expository,

argumentative types of tasks; such information should also be made clear to L2 writers, and ways to know more academic vocabulary items and to use them in actual writing should be part of a writing course emphasizing these types of writing.

Another aspect that L2 writing teachers can help writers to understand task expectations has to do with fulfillment of task demands. This implication is particularly relevant to the

personal-familiar and impersonal-less familiar types of tasks used in the current study. L2 writers shall be aware that if the personal-familiar types of tasks are addressed impersonally and if the impersonal-less familiar types of tasks are treated as familiar tasks and not with sufficient considerations of the less familiar context, their writing quality scores are very likely to be lowered. However, there are cultural issues that might have to be considered and discussed for the personal-familiar types of tasks used in this study. The writers in this study were Chinese university EFL students, while the raters were Americans in the TESOL field in the U.S. In the Chinese culture, addressing certain personal topics impersonally is perhaps a common and socially established practice, since it is a largely collectivistic culture (Hofstede, 2001;

Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002) where people may be more inclined to speak of “we” rather than “I” in public expo-argumentative discourse; the American culture is however a

predominantly individualistic one where individual experiences, perspectives and rights are more emphasized and preferred to be expressed (Hofstede, 2001; Oyserman, Coon, & Kemmelmeier, 2002). Had the personal-familiar essays been rated by Chinese teachers, the results might have been different, which is unknown from the current study. The implication is that such kinds of complications shall be discussed with L2 writers and they may need to adjust their cultural approaches if their writing in high-stake situations is rated by raters from a very different culture, or perhaps the implication is that to accept diverse approaches to the types of personal-familiar tasks by legitimizing different cultural orientations, rating rubrics can specify the acceptability of making certain personal tasks impersonal, or altogether personal tasks should be avoided in high- stakes assessment situations since writers from certain cultures may not feel comfortable writing about themselves in the public discourse.

There are also challenges in providing L2 writing instruction on the impersonal-less familiar types of tasks used in this study. Although there are values in writing on such kinds of tasks, as they call for greater critical thinking skills and the ability to think from others’

perspectives and life situations. The challenge for L2 writing teachers then is also to teach such thinking skills, in addition to teaching writing skills and language skills. According to dual processing theories (Evans, 2010; Evans, 2011; Stanovich, West, & Toplak, 2011), it is yet commonplace for individuals to experience cognitive biases through access to and application of short-cut rules and heuristics when confronted with reasoning and rational thinking tasks,

showing the difficulty for people to actually do critical thinking and evaluate based on given circumstances. As the findings of the current study demonstrate, a number of college-level EFL students in China perhaps lack the thinking skills to engage with writing tasks that require them to write about less familiar contexts and circumstances. These L2 writers are likely to benefit

from instruction on various types of logical thinking, particularly deductive thinking where conclusions are drawn from premises or things they already know to be true. Then these writers would certainly benefit from doing actual writing on different impersonal-less familiar topics, getting feedback from the instructor and their peers, and further learning from revision processes.

The findings of the study also have implications for sequencing of writing tasks in L2 writing instruction and in L2 instruction in general. First, since argumentative tasks are found to have greater demands on linguistic features such as lexical sophistication and overall syntactic complexity than narrative, expository, and expo-argumentative tasks, then for certain thematic content, argumentative tasks can be sequenced after the other task types so that learners’ lexical and syntactic repertories can be built up for the linguistically more challenging task type.

Similarly, since impersonal-less familiar tasks are found to be more demanding on the linguistic features of lexical complexity and overall syntactic complexity, more familiar tasks on the same thematic content can be sequenced before those tasks so that related lexical items and syntactic structures are activated for the more challenging task type. It is likely that most writing teachers are aware of the importance of sequencing simpler tasks before more complex ones; what this study is able to demonstrate to the teachers is that complex tasks can be linguistically more demanding and thus enrichment of linguistic resources is much needed through performance on simpler tasks on the same thematic content before more complex tasks are used.

Another implication for L2 instruction in general is that argumentative tasks can be particularly helpful for language development, since essays on those tasks are found to have significantly greater overall syntactic complexity and somewhat greater linguistic accuracy and lexical demands are also higher for those tasks. Argumentative tasks should be encouraged to be used in L2 instruction, since they can help learners to further stretch and stabilize their

interlanguage, which are part of the goals of task-based language instruction and L2 learning (Skehan, 1992; 1996).