The relationship between writing accuracy and writing fluency a study among efl high school students

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING VINH UNIVERSITY NGUYEN THI THUY THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING ACCURACY AND WRITING FLUENCY: A STUDY AMONG EFL HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS Field: Theo

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

VINH UNIVERSITY

NGUYEN THI THUY

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING ACCURACY

AND WRITING FLUENCY: A STUDY AMONG EFL HIGH

SCHOOL STUDENTS

MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION

Nghe An - 2013

MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND TRAINING

VINH UNIVERSITY

NGUYEN THI THUY

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN WRITING ACCURACY

AND WRITING FLUENCY: A STUDY AMONG EFL HIGH

SCHOOL STUDENTS

Field: Theory and Methodology of English Language Teaching

Code: 60.14.10

MASTER THESIS IN EDUCATION

Supervisor: Dr Tran Thi Ngoc Yen

Nghe An — 2013

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor, Dr Tran Thi Ngoc Yen, for her generous assistance and guidance while I was doing this project I am grateful to her for her precious advice and constant support

I would also like to send my sincere thanks to the teachers and students in Dien Chau high schools, Nghe An who have helped me in providing the materials and doing the task

I also wish to thank the administrators and teachers at Vinh University,

Vietnam for their cooperation and help during the study

I am also in debt of my lecturers, my friends, my classmates as well as my colleagues for their invaluable comments and criticism

Finally, I would like to delicate this work to my parents and family, who have been always supporting me with love and sympathy

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS

CLT: Communicate Language Teaching

EAP: English of Academic Purpose

EGP: English for General Purpose

EFL: English as a Foreign Language

ESL: English as a Second Language

LI: Learner’s native language

L2: The foreign language

%: Percent

LIST OF TABLES

Table 3.1 Scores on general English test for all participants

Table 3.2 Summary of number of students in three levels of EFL proficiency Table 3.3 Number of words written 30 minute for all participants

Table 3.4 Summary of number of words for all participants

Table 3.5 Scores on accuracy for all participants

Table 3.6 Summary of number of students in levels of writing

Table 3.7 Categories, Frequencies, and Percentages of Errors for 80

Table 3.14 Summary of mean of general test scores, fluency scores and

accuracy scores for three groups

LIST OF EIGURES Figure 2.1 The Writing Process

Figure 3.1 Summary of percentage of errors

TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS AND SYMBOLS 5-5525 2tr Il LIST OF 0.90)05-1115 IV LIST OF FIGURES

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1.1 Rationale

1.2 Aims of the study

1.4 Scope of the study:

2.7 Measuring writing accuracy and writing fluency

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CHAPTER 3 THE STUDY 14 35

VI

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION

1.1 Rationale

The English language has rapidly become the most popular foreign language in Vietnamese, especially at schools, colleges and universities For learners of English, the English language surely brings about a better career prospect Needless to say, writing is among the most prominent skills that language learners need to learn as an essential component of their academic practice and later on in their professional life, which partially explains why teaching writing has prompted a good deal of research that covers various aspects of its broad instructional contexts Teaching and learning how to write successfully gets even more complicated and challenging for both language teachers and students when it comes to ESL/ EFL environments compared with teaching L1 writing For many Vietnamese students, presenting written work is a substantial challenge They may have little experience of writing since leaving secondary schools or colleges, and may be very anxious about having to write essays marked by a tutor There is no doubt that having one’s work assessed by another is a daunting experience, but there are techniques, which can be adopted and make this skill easier

Of the four skills, writing, in general, is considered the most difficult

one for every student, especially for high school students To acquire the communicative competence, the four language skills (reading, speaking, listening and writing) are taught regularly at schools and universities, among which writing skill is very important because it is a productive skill It is also because of the fact that besides speaking, people frequently have to communicate with each other via writing

The ability to write effectively and fluently in English is becoming increasingly important in today’s modern world, since communication through language has become more and more essential Writing is known as

an important skill for multifarious reasons in education and business In fact,

it plays a significant role in personal and professional life

Consequently, it has become one of the major requirements in English for General Purposes (EGP) as well as English of Academic Purposes (EAP) syllabi Evidently, the pedagogical purposes of writing range from improving, training, and practicing language in the early stages of learning to communicating fluently and accurately at intermediate and more advanced levels (Raimes, 1987) Indubitably, writing is a complicated process through which ideas are created and expressed Learning to write in a foreign language is even harder and it takes a considerable amount of time and effort

to write skillfully To become a skillful writer, the role of English writing instruction in foreign language education is quite prominent (Weigle, 2002)

It is the fact that students at Nghe An in general and the students in particular are very weak at paragraph writing There are some reasons why English major students face a number of problems when studying paragraph writing It is inevitable that balancing accuracy and fluency in writing is a challenge for these EFL learners The relationship between fluency and accuracy writing is often forgotten in their writing The studies have revealed that students often make vocabulary and grammatical mistakes They use the wrong words when they write a paragraph because of their misunderstanding the meaning of words so they face a lot of confusion in vocabulary use A student wrote: “My most difficulty in paragraph writing is to choose the right

words” Obviously, mastering the usage of English vocabulary and structures

is very difficult for every student, so a new and appropriate teaching strategy needs applying soon in order to help students enhance their knowledge of language

Therefore, these Vietnamese students have had allegedly very little chance to practice and comparatively more experiences in writing English texts on a variety of topics In spite of this, they appear to be lacking in confidence, generally more concerned with and hesitant in writing than in speaking activities They are also observed insistent on accuracy, always correcting errors The learners have long been described as passive and submissive Despite controversies raised in recent years becoming more open- minded and active in thinking, a study of the junior and senior middle school students in Viet Nam found that these new generation students still exhibit some of the ‘old’ traditional values like perseverance and that their purpose for learning English was to pass the exam (Shi, 2006) This exam-oriented learning culture is so influential that learners often treat exercises and tasks as taking an exam, and the result is that they focus on the ‘correctness’ rather than on the ‘meaning’ (Huang, 2005)

Added to this is the fact that “risk-taking is generally not regarded as behavior proper to a conscientious scholar” (Wen & Johnson, 1997, p.37, though risk-taking is one of the prerequisites for language development (Skehan, 1996), and it is often said to have a positive effect on fluency and complexity but not accuracy It would be of interest to see whether the subjects in my study exhibit characteristics of the learners towards accuracy

or if they choose to take risks and stretch their interlanguage, not just in individual tasks, but also in their second language development

Moreover, some studies have issued that fluency is often associated

with speed, but speed in itself has no value What is important is the ability to work with the speed and accuracy that is appropriate to the purpose for reading or writing Being measured and deliberate may be right for one purpose, and reading or writing quickly, or expressively, may be best for another Thus, teachers wonder whether they should practice theirs learners to write fluently, accurately or both

Because of the practicality in teaching and learning English writing, this study, entitled “ The relationship between writing accuracy and writing fluency: A study among EFL high school students” was carried out to examine the relationship between learners’ writing fluency and accuracy and how these factors relate with English language proficiency

1.2 Aims of the study

The study aimed to explore the relationship between writing accuracy and writing fluency in English language learning and English language development and how these factors relate to English language proficiency

1.3 Research questions

This research was carried out to answer the following questions:

1 How is EFL learners’ English proficiency related to writing accuracy and writing fluency?

2 How is EFL learners’ writing fluency related to writing accuracy?

1.4 Scope of the study:

The study examines the learning of writing skill among students at

highschool in Dien Chau town in Nghe An, but due to the limited time, it is

confined to finding out the relationship between writing accuracy and writing fluency in their performance In the study, the researcher also tried to look at the errors committed by those EFL highschool students The focus was placed

on such English language aspects as grammatical, lexical and other errors related to paragraph writing This was done in order to help EFL students in the area learn how to increase both writing fluency and writing accuracy

1.5 Design of the thesis

The thesis consists of four chapters

Chapter 1 is the introduction, which provides a brief introduction and rationale for the research

Chapter 2 is the literature review, in which previous research about writing, the process of writing, writing fluency, writing accuracy and the relationship between writing accuracy and writing fluency will be discussed

Chapter 3 presents the research methodology including the participants, methods and procedures used to collect and analyze the data Preliminary survey results, data analysis, research findings and discussion on the findings are also presented in this chapter

Chapter 4 presents an overall conclusion of the study Limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are also included in this chapter

CHAPTER 2 LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Wrifing

Writing, together with its teaching in both first and second language contexts, is currently the subject of a considerable amount of research and other educational endeavor Papers on aspects of writing can be found in almost any issue of applied linguistics or educational journals, and there are currently a number of journals devoted to the subject

This is, however, a fairly recent development, with writing and its teaching only emerging as a scholarly discipline in the 1970s (Nystrand, Green, & Wiemelt 1993; Raimes 1991) Before that time writing was seldom seen as something to be taught for its own sake and in the second language classroom it was most often used as a way of demonstrating mastery of the structures studied in class or for dictation

There are various opinions of writing given by different researchers Each one has their own idea about writing

Tribble (1996, p 3) considers writing as language skill involving not just a graphic representation of speech, but the development and presentation

of though in a structured way Murray (1987, p 29) however, defined writing

as “a creative discovery procedure characterized by the dynamic interplay of content and language: the use of language to explore beyond the known

content”

Writing is also defined as a social process by Candlin and Hyland (1999, p 107) They stated that writing is “an engagement in a social process,

where the production of texts reflects methodologies, arguments and rhetorical strategies constructed to engage colleagues and persuade them of the claims that are made”

While Byrne (1988, p 1) considers writing as the act of forming graphic symbol only such as letters or combination of letters, Sokolik (2003,

p 88) defined writing as a physical and mental act He asserted that writing

requires writers to commit words or ideas and to convent ideas, think about

how to express them, and organize them into statements and paragraphs She also considers writing a process and product, and writing aims at expressing and impressing The writers have to generate ideas, organize, draft, edit, read, re-read to produce a product-a paragraph, an essay or a report and writers try

to express their ideas and feeling to impress their readers in certain ways

From language teachers’ perspective, writing is “a language skill which is difficult to acquire” (Tribble, 1996, p 3) It is “a process that occurs over a period of time, particularly if we take into account the sometimes extended periods of thinking that precede creating an initial draft” (Harris,

1993, p 10) Tribble (1996, p 11) also stressed that writing “normally requires some form of instruction” and that “it is not a skill that is readily picked up by exposure”

Writing involves many different aspects According to Roger, Phillips, and Walters (1995, p 113), writing involves seven aspects They are handwriting, spelling, punctuation, sentence construction, organizing a text and paragraphing, text cohesion and style All aspects are carefully considered

by any writers

Although proficiency in writing is somewhat related to overall language proficiency, particularly at the lower end of the scale (Cumming 1989), improvements in general language proficiency do not necessarily affect a student’s proficiency in writing in their L2 However, writing instruction can be effective in raising proficiency in a number of areas Recent approaches to instruction have recognized that, while weak areas can and should be specifically addressed, writing must always be seen as culturally and socially situated Cumming (2002)cautions that writing makes teachers to

be wary of exercises that attempt to break writing down into component skills

as such exercises often eliminate portions of the task that are important to the personal and cultural significance of the writing

This more eclectic and holistic approach recognizes that learners’ needs are different at various stages in their learning and that teachers must develop tasks to accommodate this Grabe and Kaplan (1996) give a detailed discussion of teaching approaches at beginning, intermediate and advanced levels of proficiency At lower levels frequent, short writing activities can help to build familiarity and develop a useful, productive vocabulary The variety and length of tasks can be extended for intermediate level students - developing themes that are more complex and building a repertoire of strategies for effective writing Advanced level students need to develop a greater understanding of genres and the place of writing in particular discourse communities They also need to develop their strategies and establish their own voice in the second language

In short, writing is an art that writers want to communicate with certain

groups of audience Through the mastery of writing, individuals come to be

fully effective in intellectual organization, in the management of everyday affairs, in the expression of ideas and arguments By writing they can have control of both information and of people as well

2.2 The process of writing

The ability to write articulately gives one the power and opportunity to share and influence thoughts, ideas, and opinions with others, not only in day- to-day situations, but across time and space As Mary (1991, p.13) puts, “The value that we place on reading and writing arises out of our shared need to be literate people, this is a function of our society and of our culture” As writers,

it is important to produce quality works, and as educators, we have learned a great deal about what it means to teach others to do the same This brief offers

an overview of research and best practice in teaching the writing process

Writing instruction began to change throughout the United States as teachers found more holistic approaches to teaching writing (McCarthy,

Hoffman, Stable, Elliott, Dressman, & Abbott, 1994) Responding to the need

for innovative instruction and pedagogies, the last two decades saw an emergence of new practices that moved beyond rote repetition and technical instruction Instead, writing was taught as a vehicle for creative expression and critical thought Rather than focusing on spelling, grammar, and other writing conventions, the holistic process emphasizes the actual process of writing It concentrates on writing as a recursive process in which writers have the opportunity to plan, draft, edit, and revise their work (Hillocks, 1987; Murray, 1982) The writer is taught to review and revise several drafts, which enables and encourages new ideas Grammatical changes and conventional editing occur during the revision or editing stage (Ballator, Farnum, &

Kaplan, 1999; Flower & Hayes, 1981) Furthermore, since grammar and conventions are not the focus of writing, the writing process may be adapted for use even with young writers in kindergarten (Sealey, Sealey, & Millmore, 1979).Writing is a uniquely individual undertaking and the same individual may use different methods to express him or herself Characteristically, the writing process approach recognizes that there are many stages to writing and that these stages are fluid and overlapping (Bereiter & Scardamalia, 1983;

Flower & Hayes, 1980; Murray, 1982) However, researchers and educators

have identified several logical steps that most writers go through These steps are displayed in Figure 2.1

Figure 2.1 The Writing Process

Pre-writing Sharing & Revising & Drafting & Writing

Responding Editing Publishing

-“Getting ready -Write an Write and

-Brainstorm ‘Focuson -Peer editing conventions products

- Organize ideas communication -Writing = Text -Build

(Flower & Hayes, 1981; Greenwald, Persky, Campbell, & Mazzeo, 1999; Unger & Fleischman, 2004; National Center for Education Statistics, 1996)

Students are taught how to share and communicate their ideas through words

In some classrooms, they share their work with peers through writing workshops and peer editing, teaching them to recognize the value of writing and the purpose in creating a solid and substantial work (Graves, 1983)

2.2.1 The pre-writing stage

Pre-writing, or planning what is going to be written, is an essential step

in the writing process and should account for 70 percent of the writing time (Murray, 1982) Research indicates that skilled writers spend significantly more time organizing and planning what they are going to write (Hillocks, 1986) Most students, however, spend on average only about 3 minutes to prepare for their writing (National Center for Educational Statistics, 1996) Students spend little time thinking and planning how to express their thoughts before writing them down Therefore, they are not accessing information and ideas that could possibly enhance their writing

2.2.2 The re-writing stage

An important component to the writing process is its recursive nature, which allows writers to revise their work continually Evidence shows that writers not only revise what they are writing, but also revisit their goals and plans for writing This process allows writers to take into account new ideas and thoughts and to have the opportunity to incorporate it into their writing Research by Bereiter et al (1982) demonstrates that the processes involved in writing are hierarchically related and notably recursive The research team also found that children have much more extensive knowledge about a topic than that reflected in their typical writings They argue that when children stop writing it is not because they run out of things to say, but because they do not yet have adequate methods of articulating what they know

2.2.3 The writing stage

As methods of teaching writing have evolved, significant research has gone into understanding the process that a writer goes through when composing material and how to teach writing most effectively In an effort to synthesize the findings, one comprehensive review looked at 2,000 studies focused on identifying school instructional methods that most successfully enhanced writing ability (Hillock, 1987) Several hundred of these studies used experimental treatments and interventions After rigorous screening, meta-analysis was conducted on 60 of the latter studies containing variables that could be compared across studies The meta-analysis revealed that teaching through inquiry was the instructional method with the greatest impact on the quality of students writing

In this method, students use sets of data and, in a structured manner,

incorporate them into their writing Students may record, describe, and present evidence while taking into account set criteria For example, students may be given information about a particular subject, such as pollution, prison rebellion, etc, and then be asked to consider ways to help solve the problem This inquiry process leads students to develop better ideas, produce stronger support and evidence, and recognize and address positions that are in opposition to them The research findings indicate that having students go through the steps of observing and writing had greater impact on the quality

of writing than did more traditional teaching using model writings In fact, teaching through inquiry was 3.5 times more effective in improving writing quality than free writing techniques and more than 2.5 times more effective than the traditional study of model writing However, consistent with earlier research, Hillocks also found that studying model writings or presenting

students with good pieces of writing was significantly more effective in improving the quality of writing than was studying grammar Additionally, using sentence-combining strategies to teach writing also showed positive effects (Hillocks, 1987) Directly teaching students how to achieve more complex syntactic structures enhances their writing quality and sophistication

Writing instruction has come a long way It has evolved from rote, traditional method with an emphasis on writing conventions, maturing into a process that is able to accommodate a writer’s need to plan, brainstorm, seek

feedback, and revise their work Most importantly, however, substantial

research has helped inform the way writing is taught

2.3 Writing accuracy

Many researchers have reasonably argued that for academically oriented and advanced L2 learners, grammar instruction is essential if they are

to achieve their educational and professional goals (Celce-Murcia, 1991;

Schmidt, 1994; Shaw & Liu, 1998) Celce-Murcia (1991), for instance,

emphasized the importance of a reasonable degree of grammatical accuracy in writing She mentioned that high frequency of grammatical errors in nonnative speaker’s academic writing (an average of 7.2 errors per 100 words) most probably makes their writings unacceptable to the University faculties A large number of extensive and detailed studies have demonstrated that mere exposure to L2 vocabulary, grammar, discourse, and formal written text is not the most effective means of attaining academic L2 proficiency

(e.g., Ellis, 1990; Hinkel, 2002; Laufer & Nation, 2001; Norris & Ortega,

2000; Schmidt, 2000) In other words, exposure to the input is not a guarantee for language acquisition Schmidt (2000) proposes the noticing hypothesis to

emphasize that only items in linguistic input that are attended to by language learners are likely to be acquired

Chang and Swales (1999) investigated specific discourse and sentence- level writing skills of highly advanced non-native speaker students They indicate that even in the case of advanced and highly literate non-native speakers, exposure to substantial amounts of reading and experience with writing in academic contexts does not ensure their becoming aware of discourse and sentence-level linguistic features of academic writing and the attainment of the necessary writing skills Chang and Swales concluded that explicit instruction in advanced academic writing and text is needed Similarly, Ellis (1990) believed that formal classroom teaching with its emphasis on linguistic accuracy would engage the learner in planned discourse and develop the corresponding type of competence

However, as mentioned, the predominant method of instruction in the

teaching of L2 writing has mainly remained focused on the writing process (Johns, 1990; Reid, 1993; Zamel, 1983) and the product of writing is seen as secondary to the writing process Therefore, as Hinkel (2004) mentions,

issues of L2 grammar, lexis, and errors are addressed only as needed in the

context of writing, and L2 writers with proficiency levels higher than beginning are exposed to text and discourse to learn from them and, thus, acquire L2 grammar and lexis naturally She goes on to suggest that the assessment of L2 writing skills by EFL professionals on standardized and institutional placement testing has largely remained focused on the writing product without regard to the writing process (Vaughan, 1991, p.6) She also concludes that “the disparity between the teaching methods adopted in L2

writing instruction and evaluation criteria of the quality of L2 writing has produced outcomes that are damaging and costly for most EFL students, who are taught brainstorming techniques and invention, prewriting, drafting, and revising skills, whereas their essential linguistic skills, such as academic vocabulary and formal features of grammar and text, are only sparsely and inconsistently addressed”

Xudong, Cheng, Varaprasad, and Leng (2010) investigated the impact

of English for Academic Purposes course on the development of academic writing abilities of ESL/EFL graduate students The study found that not much progress had been made by these students in terms of grammar accuracy In addition, students’ responses to the questionnaire indicated that they felt the course did not help them improve their grammar accuracy As Hinkel (2004) mentions, intensive and consistent instruction in L2 grammar is essential for academically bound nonnative speakers Consistent grammar instruction has been shown to be effective in improving the quality of L2 production (Cumming, 1990; Ellis 2001; Fotos 2002; Norris and Ortegga

2001; Schmidt 1994)

2.4 Writing fluency

The researchers have discovered that, surprisingly, there was no viable definition specifically for writing fluency available in current ESL/EFL literature Brown (1994, p 113) does refer to fluency activities as “saying or writing a steady flow of language for a short period of time without any self-

or other correction at all” Although this explanation is helpful, it is not appropriate as the basis for a definition of writing fluency when applied to most studies focusing on writing Brown’s explanation could lead to the

erroneous conclusion that the longer the flow of language, and the more words produced, the more fluent the writer is When writing is done with computers, as is likely to be the case in CALL programs, any word count increase may be attributable in whole or in part to an improvement in students’ typing speed throughout the duration of the program rather than to a true development of writing fluency Brown’s explanation also ignores critical factors such as lexical complexity and text comprehensibility If lexical complexity and comprehensibility are not taken into account, students could conceivably be identified as having improving their writing fluency merely on the strength of having written the same simple sentence repeatedly over the timed period

Grammatical accuracy and proficiency are important in evaluating L2 writing in general; however, they are problematic when evaluating L2 writing fluency This is most clearly understood if a group of native English speakers

is taken as an example While the native speakers are all considered to be fluent writers in their native language, it is unlikely that they will share the same level of grammatical accuracy or proficiency in their writing Some L2 instructors may hesitate to take a similar view in regard to L2 writers although logically they should do so Second, writing rarely, if ever, results in error- free production without Following Storch and Tapper (2009), we measured fluency in terms of the total number of words and words per T-unit To count

the total number of words of an essay, the word count tool of the Microsoft Word was used In counting words, titles were excluded

Besides, according to Briére (1966), a hot issue in teaching English writing as a second language in 1960s was whether to focus on quantity or

quality Briére (1966) states that Pincas (1962, p 142) was on one end of

“quality before quantity” and Erazmus (1960, p 142) was on the other end which suggested “quantity before quality”, especially at the beginning stages

of learning how to write In his study, Briére (1966, p 142) simplified the definition of quantity as “the total number of words or sentences written about

a subject within a given period time” and quality as “grammatically correct, coherent and interesting development of a theme or idea” However, the overly simplified fluency definition by Briére (1966) is insufficient to illustrate the whole concept of fluency used by other researchers According to Brand (2006, p 2), the general meaning of fluency is defined as completing an activity or a task effortlessly so that students complete activities or tasks

“automatically, fluidly, rapidly, quickly, and accurately” Other researchers described fluency by using similar terms such as effortless, without hesitation, fearless in making mistakes, expressing ideas lucidly, etc (Brand & Brand, 2006; Casanave, 2004; MacGowan-Gilhooly, 1991) In terms of writing fluency, Lannin (2007, p 4) stated that some researchers defined writing fluency as “cohesiveness and coherence of ideas in the writing, aided by syntactic structures that enable a reader to easily move thorough the text”

According to MacGowan-Gilhooly (1991), when fluency was emphasized before accuracy in classes, an increase in students" confidence was most noticeable among the affective consequences; moreover, teachers were able to observe a decrease in students" fear of writing, especially for low-level students It was not only MacGowan-Gilhooly and the teachers who were able to perceive the change in the students, but also the students themselves felt their increased confidence due to the improved fluency in

their writing Eventually, it led them to generate and develop more thoughts and ideas as compared to before when grammatical accuracy was the main

concerm

Casanave (2004), who is another researcher researching L2 writing fluency, mentioned that focusing on writing fluency tends to help students explore more in their writing without worrying about grammatical accuracy or pressure from writing classes, e.g., grammar errors or grades In another study (Casanave, 1995), which focuses on the benefit of using journal writing activities in EFL college-level classes, she argued that students tend to try out

more of their ideas in the “risk-free environment.” Vanett and Jurich (1990)

also found similar findings related to students" change in approach to writing activities when they are in an environment where making mistakes was considered trivial

2.5 Accuracy vs fluency in language learning

According to many language practitioners and researchers, L2/FL performance and competence are complex terms as they contain various components The majority of past research has relied on three factors to describe and assess L2/FL performance and competence: fluency, accuracy, and complexity (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005; Skehan, 1998) Since the 1990s, these three variables have come into focus in L2/FL learning research It is believed that fluency, accuracy, and complexity can be used as both performance descriptors and proficiency indicators Fluency refers to using the language with native-like rapidity, accuracy refers to being error-free, complexity refers to the ability to handle a wide range of structures and

vocabulary (Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998, p 4).Accuracy has been distinguished from fluency since the 1980s when researchers were trying to depict and measure second language oral skills Previous research has distinguished fluency-oriented activities and accuracy-oriented activities

in a language program Fluency activities help to improve spontaneous oral linguistic production while accuracy focuses on the accurate production of language structures (Brumfit, 1984) Complexity, the third component of the triad, came into focus in the 1990s after Skehan (1998) for the first time added it to his L2 model Since then complexity has been commonly characterized as “the extent to which the language produced in a performing task is elaborate and varied” (Ellis, 2003, p 340) or “the scope

of expanding and restructured second language knowledge” (Wolfe- Quintero, et al., 1998, p 4) In the L2/FL acquisition literature, complexity relates itself to language tasks and language production Some researchers also broke down the notion of complexity into two kinds: cognitive complexity and linguistic complexity (Housen, Daele, & Pierrard, 2005; Williams & Evans., 1998) While cognitive complexity concerns the second language learner and is determined by such factors related to the learners, one of which is memory span, linguistic complexity concerns the second language system Some indicators of the learner’s linguistic complexity are the variety of structures and the large stock of vocabulary

In L2/FL learning, the majority of developmental measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency have been used to explore the effects of a treatment or an external factor on oral and written language production For example, Yuan and Ellis (2003), and Mehnert (1998) examined how planning time helps learners to write better and assessed the learner’s writing in

three dimensions: fluency (syllables per minute (spm)), accuracy and complexity The results showed planning time resulted in greater fluency, accuracy, and complexity However, other authors, such as Ellis (1987) and Crookes (1989), argued that planning time affects the learner’s language production in terms of complexity but did not significantly influence it in terms of accuracy Recently Ahmadian and Tavakoli (2011) indicated that their findings showed careful planning time positively influenced complexity and accuracy but resulted in fluency

According to The Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics fluency is the ability to produce written and/or spoken language with ease speak with a good but not necessarily perfect command

of intonation, vocabulary and grammar communicate ideas effectively, and produce continuous speech without causing comprehension difficulties or a breakdown of communication Accuracy is the ability to produce grammatically correct sentences but may not include the ability to speak or write fluently (p.141) Fluency, accuracy and complexity, are three dimensions to language proficiency which have been “theorized to have independent status in second language performance in that learners can have different goals at different times when performing in an L2” (Larsen- Freeman, 2006, p 592) Fluency, according to Foster and Skehan (1996), reflects “the primacy of meaning” and avoids “rule-based, constructed language” Accuracy and complexity, on the other hand, focus on the form of the output, with the former emphasizing the undesirableness of error and the latter the use of more elaborate language This contrast between form and meaning captures the major dilemma that second language learners face as they make use of and develop their evolving interlanguage As they

communicate with others, “learners may choose to priorities one aspect of the

L2 over another” (Ellis & Barkhuizen, 2005, p 140)

These three dimensions or aspects of language can be operationalised

in linguistic terms to measure learner’s performances and their changes From

a target language perspective, as a learner’s interlanguage develops, his/her language output should ‘look’ more like the target language, in terms of the fluency, accuracy and complexity of their L2, along morphological, lexical, and syntactic lines, which should ultimately be demonstrated by increases in the linguistic tools used for measurement

The three-dimensional view of language proficiency/performance has its roots in the cognitive model of information processing The model stipulates that comprehension, processing and production in a second language call for the functioning of the working memory which is limited in capacity, so that attention to one aspect of the language produced might have

a negative effect on others (Skehan, 1998) The basic assumption is that attentional resources are limited The amount and accessibility of such resources and the capacity for processing may vary among individuals This view can therefore account for the wide differences in L2 learning success and learners’ language products Skehan (1998, p 73) suggests that in the

“

output stage of language acquisition, “ fluency, complexity, and accuracy are all desirable goals but compete with one another during ongoing communication” These goals may be conscious or unconscious Learners thus perform and develop in their L2 within the confines of the processing systems and attentional resources The significance of this view lies in how this competition for resources is realized in learners’ language performance at

a particular point in time as well as over a period of time It is very possible

that a group of learners may show a certain “orientation” to a particular language dimension over a specified period of time by allocating resources to

it continuing and causing it to change, or ideally to grow The picture of limitations in language processing and change is taken further by the dynamic-systems approach to second language acquisition that has come to

the rise in recent years (de Bot et al., 2007; Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Robinson

& Mervis, 1998)

2.6 Accuracy vs fluency in writing

Learners’ interlanguage development can be expressed in terms of their levels of fluency and accuracy in the second language (Fulcher & Davidson, 2007: 8) Both fluency and accuracy are essential measures in the assessment

of a learner’s proficiency in a second language, and are core criteria used in rating scales ( Fulcher, 2003, Hawkey & Barker, 2004)

Fluency is difficult to define, although it is a common term in language teaching and testing and has been in use for a long time (Fulcher & Davidson, 2007, p.7) Fillmore (1979, p.93) identifies four different kinds of fluency: the ability to produce language rapidly: coherently and densely: appropriately; and creatively He states that the maximally gifted wielder of language is somebody who has all these abilities Brumfit (1984, p 54) points out that, with the exception of the first, they all require capacities that we recognize in people who are not linguistically fluent The first quality, rapidity, refers to the quantity of production, which in terms of the present discussion refers to the ability to write without significant pauses for an extended period Lennon (1990, p 387) adopts this narrow sense of fluency, and defines it as the rate and length of output Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki and

Kim (1998, p 14) adopt the same approach and state that fluency in writing means that more words and more structures are accessed in a limited time, whereas a lack of fluency means that only a few words

or structures are accessed Fluency is therefore a measure of the sheer number of words or structural units a writer is able to include in their writing within a particular period of time

Accuracy in morpho-syntactic usage is a general requirement in language teaching, although there has been a tendency in recent years to neglect it because of the emphasis on communicative ability Writing requires higher levels of accuracy than spoken language Accuracy level depends on a learner’s linguistic competence, i.e the degree of accuracy of the language representation itself, the strength of interference from the L1 or earlier stages of L2 development, and the degree of automatization that has taken place The goal is to produce as few errors as possible Accuracy can therefore be defined as “freedom from error”, or comparison with target- like language usage There have been substantial studies that investigate relationships among different features of the text Various researchers have examined the relationship between the two discourse features of writing,

cohesion and coherence, and the relative influence of these two features on

holistic writing quality Tierney and Mosenthal (1983), for example, asked college teachers to rate student essays with respect to general coherence and then carried out cohesive analysis of the essays The results indicate that there

is no relationship between cohesive ties and coherence rankings The study, therefore, argues against using cohesion as a predictor of textual coherence McCulley (1985) investigated relationships among cohesion, coherence, and writing quality of student persuasive essays He reported somewhat different

findings that one cohesion category-the lexical cohesive features of synonym, hyponym, and collocation-was significantly related to coherence and writing quality ratings He also found that coherence correlated significantly with writing quality judgments The evidence in his study, therefore, suggests that not all of cohesive categories are significant features in determining either coherence or writing quality but coherence is a valid construct of writing quality judgment Spiegel and Fitzgerald (1990) supported what McCulley found in that there was some limited evidence of a relationship between cohesion and coherence but that there was a strong positive correlation between the ratings of coherence and holistic quality of writing They, however, found no significant relationship between cohesion and writing quality Cox, Shanahan, and Tinzmann (1991) reported different results In investigating children’s expository texts, they found that the ratings of writing quality correlated significantly with texts using more devices that are cohesive From their findings, cohesive harmony played a significant role in a text being judged well written Other notable findings regarding the relationship between discourse organization and quality of writing include the results from Chiang (1999), Govardhan (1994), Johnson (1987), Sweedler- Brown (1993), and Witte and Faigley (1981) They reported inconsistent findings Witte & Faigley (1981) found that the writers of high-rated essays employed more cohesive ties than those of low-rated essays Their findings were supported by a later study conducted by Chiang (1999) In investigating the importance of grammatical and textual features in the evaluation of French as second language writing, he found a strong correlation between discourse features, particularly those for accuracy writing, and fluency writing

In contrast to the findings of the preceding studies, Johnson (1987) reported no differences in the number of cohesive ties between good and weak compositions written by Malaysian ESL learners His findings were confirmed by Govardhan (1994)’s study which showed that the writers of high-rated and intermediate-rated essays used almost the same amount of cohesive ties Furthermore, Brown (1993), in a comparison of the influences

of rhetorical and sentence-level features on holistic scores, reported that analytic scores on rhetorical features of organization and paragraph development showed no correlation with the essays’ holistic scores

With regard to the relationship between grammatical accuracy and discourse organization, Kroll (1990) reported no relationship between syntactic accuracy and discourse fluency in a study conducted with freshman composition students from various language backgrounds Her findings suggested that students could produce well-written essays in bad English and poor essays in good English Concerning the relationship between grammatical accuracy and holistic quality of writing, studies done thus far suggest that grammatical accuracy may correlate with holistic ratings Arthur (1979), in an attempt to find out what measures can discriminate among holistic ratings of compositions, found that grammatical errors per word was a measure that was related to holistic ratings The previous findings were confirmed by later researchers For example, Homburg (1984) found that a certain type of errors called second-degree errors, which are serious but comprehensible errors, was related to holistic ratings Brown (1993) found a strong correlation between sentence-level errors and holistic ratings whereas Chiang (1999) reported a correlation between morphological and syntactic accuracy with holistic judgments of overall writing quality

Due to the fact that studies done thus far concerning the relationships among grammatical accuracy, discourse features, and quality of writing These showed mixed results and that only a few studies have investigated all three types of measures-grammatical accuracy for a single population of learners, it is worth studying them to offer more insights regarding the relationships among these three aspects of writing

Writing needs practicing and internalizing a set of structures that can promote a balanced development of learners' fluency, accuracy, and complexity in the target language As Skehan emphasizes, "the more the task

is planned, the less computational work needs to be done during the task performance Things being equal, the result is more, when attention is given

as a general tool to achieve a variety of goals such as greater fluency, accuracy, and complexity" (p 73) He also distinguishes two aspects of linguistic performance:

(a) Fluency, which is concerned with the learners’ capacity to produce language in real time without any pauses or hesitations Fluency is measured

in different ways, such as speech rate, length of the run, pause length, false starts repetitions, and reformulating;

(b) Accuracy, which is the extent to which the language produced conforms to the target language norms There are different studies on accuracy either as an error free piece of language or accurate use of specific form With gradual acceptance of errors as productive and developmental rather than substandard and deviant, grammatical accuracy became secondary

to communication ESL composition textbooks reflected the theoretical shift

by focusing on the teaching of organization patterns common in English academic prose, topic, thesis sentences, paragraphs, and essay modes with

their focus primarily on product This current traditional approach is still widely used in many writing classes

Consequently, new pedagogy has begun to develop traditional teachers-centered approaches into more learner-centered courses so academic writing was viewed as communicative social act Based on a widely accepted categorization, writing tasks in second/foreign language classes are either real-world tasks, which are directly based on the learners' communicative goals, or pedagogic tasks that are designed to develop students’ genre knowledge and composing skills Many pedagogic tasks aim to promote discrete skills, such as improving punctuation, developing pre-writing abilities, or increasing an understanding of rhetorical forms These tasks are

selected on the basis of meta-cognitive criteria, or what students need to know

in order to build the competence required to accomplish real-world objectives

on later stages Pedagogical tasks provide a vehicle for the presentation of appropriate target language samples to learners and for the delivery of comprehension and production opportunities of negotiable difficulty Murphy (1990) emphasizes the fact that communicative tasks may be chosen and implemented so that particular pedagogical outcomes are achieved Such tasks should carefully be designed to lead students to the intended objectives He also distinguishes among the factors that affect learning outcome, contribution

of individual learner, the task performance, and the situation in which the task

is performed In topic writing tasks, for example, students are required to write free compositions on carefully chosen realistic topics Composition can

be a useful writing assessment task, too "Topic writing tasks provide students with an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to organize language materials, using their own words and ideas to communicate In topic of

writing, students should be presented with a carefully defined problem that motivates them to write They should also have an audience in mind when they write" (Murphy, 1994, p.114) Similarly, when students try to describe something they are usually trying to give the reader an exact and detailed impression of something in their minds In description writing, they are usually concerned with allocating such features as place, position, direction,

measurement, weight, size, volume, distance, and shapes and patterns Since

most descriptions are mostly concerned with universal qualities or a constant and habitual process, the present simple tense is in constant use In a text

reconstruction tasks, however, learners listen to or read a text before they start

writing After the text is removed, the learners are supposed to reconstruct the text in their own words The underlying assumption 1s that in processing a text for meaning, learners have to store the propositional content but not the linguistic forms to encode the content

Required to reconstruct the text, therefore, they are forced to draw on

their own linguistic resources Second language writers have to challenge higher-level skills of planning and organizing, as well as lower level skills of spelling, punctuation, and word choice One of the challenges in working on second language acquisition is to address the concurrent need for maintaining complexity, fluency, and accuracy in EFL learners' language The desire to investigate motors of change contributes to the challenge The current study was, therefore, an attempt to shed more light on the notion of the relationship between accuracy writing and fluency writing in EFL language teaching

2.7 Measuring writing accuracy and writing fluency

Clearly, accuracy and particularly fluency and complexity are multifaceted and multidimensional concepts Related to the problems of constructed validity discussed above (i.e the fact that accuracy, fluency and complexity lack appropriate definitions supported by theories of linguistics and language learning), there are also problems concerning _ their operationalization, that is, how can accuracy, fluency and complexity be validly, reliably and efficiently measured Accuracy, fluency and complexity have been evaluated across various language domains by means of a wide variety of tools, ranging from holistic and subjective ratings by lay or expert judges, to quantifiable measures (frequencies, ratios, formulas) of general or specific linguistic properties of L2 production so as to obtain more precise and objective accounts of an L2 learner’s level within each (sub-)dimension

of proficiency such as range of word types and proportion of subordinate clauses for lexical and syntactic complexity, number and type of errors for accuracy, number of syllables and pauses for fluency; for inventories of measures of accuracy, fluency and complexity Ellis and Barkhuizen, 2005;

Iwashita, Brown, McNamara and O'Hagan, 2008; Polio, 2001; WolfeQuintero

et al., 1998) However, critical surveys of the available tools and metrics for gauging accuracy, fluency and complexity have revealed various problems, both in terms of the analytic challenges which they present and in terms of their reliability, validity and sensitivity (Norris and Ortega, 2003; Ortega, 2003; Polio, 1997; 2001; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998) Also the correlation between holistic and objective measures of complexity, accuracy and fluency, and between general and more specific, developmentally-motivated measures, does not appear to be straightforward ( Halleck, 1995; Skehan, 2003;

Robinson and Ellis, 2008)

Besides, according to Wolfe Quintero (1998) fluency and accuracy in writing can be measured by means of length and error This is based on a straightforward premise that learners with high proficiency would write longer pieces, with fewer errors, than less proficient ones A central question

in this regard is: which production unit should be analyzed? The sentence is the obvious choice, but proves to be problematic in practice, as it is not always easy to identify it in second-language writing — learners often produce

many ands, use run-on sentences, and do not make use of punctuation

Gass and Selinker (2001, p.50) suggest that the T-unit (originally proposed for the analysis of first language learning by Hunt in 1965) is a more precise measure of syntactic development in a language, and it has been used

in a number of learner studies It has also been used for the analysis of the language of students with learning disabilities (e.g Englert & Dunsmore, 2007) A T-unit consists of a main clause, together with any clauses that are attached to or embedded in the main clause It is formally defined as “one main clause, plus any subordinate clauses or non-clausal structure that is

attached to or embedded in it” (Hunt, 1970, p 4) Each unit should be able to

function as a complete grammatically correct sentence on its own if punctuated like a sentence (started with a capital letter and ended with a full

stop) Gass and Selinker (2001, p.50) illustrate the identification of T-units as

follows:

- John woke up

- John woke up, although he was tired

- Although he was tired

The first two are T-units, while the third is not The definition of a T-

unit was adapted for use with non-native speakers by modifying its definition

to incorporate the notion of error-free T-units rather than just T-units (Gass & Selinker, 2001, p.50) The first language of the learner plays no role in T-unit analysis It therefore does not discriminate on the basis of the native language A large number of studies (cf Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998, for a review) since the 1970s have confirmed that it is a reliable measure of syntactic development in a second language, and it has been used to establish different levels of syntactic development For example, students produce more error-free T-units as they develop, both orally and in writing T-units are widely used because they are easy to identify and are relatively low-inference categories (Mackey & Gass, 2005, p.232) While T-unit analysis does not provide information on the discourse- functional aspects of learner writing, it provides important insights into their syntactic development (Grabe & Kaplan, 1997, p 46)

Some studies of L2 writers’ texts focus on the frequency or ratio of certain syntactic, morphological, and lexical features in relation to specific proficiency levels For instance, Engber (1995) set off to discover how lexical variation and errors relate to the judgments of the overall quality of timed essays written by undergraduates enrolled on an Intensive English Program She compared the holistic scores of sixty-six essays to four lexical richness measures She found strong correlations between lexical variation, which is measured by a type/token ratio, and error-free variation and score Hinkel (2003) studies the occurrence of particular syntactic and lexical features in L1 and L2 academic texts by analysing 1083 texts The study measured the types and numbers of features, even the very fine ones It was found that L2 texts are characterized by so-called simple lexical and syntactic features Some researchers focus on the effect of particular conditions for writing (e.g time)

on the linguistic features in ESL compositions (e.g., Kroll, 1990; Kenworthy,

2006) These studies, however, do not have much reference to the notion of

development and change over time There are yet other studies which describe development, but do so by examining or comparing features of learners’ texts

at different proficiency levels (Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman, 1989; Laufer and Nation, 1995; Reynolds, 2005) Longitudinal studies of writing are less

common

One longitudinal study of changes in learners’ lexical profile is by Laufer (1994) Laufer made use of the compositions of a group of English major undergraduates whose Ll was Hebrew To investigate the lexical development over time, she especially devised a tool called the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) It was found that there was some increase in the vocabulary size in terms of the vocabulary sophistication but no significant change in lexical variation after one to two semesters The conclusion was that these students lacked exposure to L2 vocabulary and she suggested that vocabulary should be taught explicitly at university This study has taken into consideration both lexical variation and sophistication which may contribute

to the lexical complexity of language output, without attention to either the interplay between the two, nor the impact on other aspects of language In

addition, the focus was on advanced native Hebrew speakers, who are

considerably different from the subjects of this study

Shaw and Liu (1998)’s study of writing development shown over two

to three months involved 164 subjects, 8 of whom were Chinese native

speakers These subjects were asked to write on a descriptive topic and a persuasive topic, each with distinct generic characteristics The researchers