Investigate the interaction between cognitive complexity and amount of L2 exposure in Saudi Students majoring in English in the English department

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Abstract

This study investigated whether Saudi EFL students' writing competence was related to their Arabic writing proficiency. The study also examined the possible relationship between Saudi students' first language (Arabic) and second language (English) writing competence and their self-regulatory abilities. Participants included 35 college-level students majoring in English at Umm Al-Qura University. The participants wrote English and Arabic argumentative essays on the same topic during two separate sessions. In addition, participants filled out the Metacognitive Awareness Inventory (Schraw & Dennison, 1994) to provide information about their self-regulation abilities. The writing tasks were scored by a group of EFL university teachers using the ESL Composition Profile (Jacobs et al., 1981). The collected data were used to compare and contrast the participants' writing competence in Arabic and English. The data were also used to test the correlation between students' self-regulation abilities (their knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition) and their overall writing competence in both languages. Data analysis revealed a strong correlation between participants' L1 (Arabic) writing proficiency and their L2 (English) writing competence. The study also revealed that Saudi students who scored high in L1/L2 writing had high self-regulation abilities.

Investigate the interaction between cognitive complexity and amount of L2 exposure in Saudi Students majoring in English in the English department

Introduction

Writing in a second language is a complex, challenging, and difficult process. This difficulty and complexity arise from the fact that writing includes discovering a thesis, developing support for it, organizing, revising, and finally editing it to ensure an effective, error-free piece of writing (Langan, 2005). These second language (L2) issues usually overwhelm lower proficiency L2 writers, sometimes to the point of a complete breakdown in the writing process (Bereiter & Scardimalia, 1987).

Additionally, research on the topic of L1/L2 similarities and differences reveals contradictory and inconsistent findings. Some researchers (e.g., Bitcher & Basturkman, 2006; Hinkel, 2004; Lee, 2005; McCarthy et al., 2005; Martinez, 2005; Thorson, 2000) argue that the L1 writing process is different from L2 writing (as cited in Farvardin and Zare-ee, 2009). Others (e.g., Mastumoto, 1995; Cook, 1998; Hirose & Sasaki, 1994; Kamimura, 2001) emphasize the similarity between the two processes and confirm a linear association between the L1 and L2 writing processes.

Moreover, studies in the field of language transfer suggest that various oral and written L1 elements are transferred during L2 linguistic production. For example, Koda (1988) found that some of these transferable elements are morpho-syntactic elements, communicative strategies, and ...