The effects of recalling and imagining prompts on writing engagement, syntactic and lexical complexity, accuracy, and fluency: A partial replication of Cho (2019)

Abstract

This replication study examined the effects of writing prompt type on second language (L2) learners’ writing performance. Fifty undergraduate academic and professional writing course pupils wrote narrative essays about a past event (recalling group/high formulation demand condition) or a future event (imagining group/high conceptualization demand condition). Writers completed a freewriting draft and were then given unlimited opportunities to revise. The writing was subjected to syntactic complexity, fluency, accuracy, and lexical complexity analyses. Writer engagement was computed as the time spent revising drafts. The previous study’s results were confirmed in that the recalling group exhibited more complexity and less accuracy in their writing than the imagining group. The recalling group also exhibited a higher level of writing fluency and possessed a higher level of engagement. Furthermore, the results of our study showed that the imagining group produced writing that was slightly more lexically complex than the recalling group. The pedagogical importance of writing prompts and their potential for affecting writing performance and writing engagement was discussed.

Keywords

• writing prompt
• fluency
• accuracy
• syntactic complexity
• lexical complexity
• engagement