Effects of Genre on EFL Learners' Writing in Terms of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency

The present study is to examine the effects of genres of writing on EFL learners' written productions, and in particular on different writing proficiency levels. In comparison to the great number of Ll studies concerning genre of writing, little attention has been paid to L2 writing studies in different genres of wiiting. To narrow this research gap, narrative and argumentative genres were used to examine L2 linguistic features with the hypothesis that there may be certain structural traits that are more characteristic of one type of genre than another. Moreover, the effects of genre may differ across writing proficiency levels. To unfold the effects of genre, 319 paired writings of Korean college learners were analyzed on 17 sub-measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF). This study concluded that Korean college writers tend to be affected by the genre of writing. Generally, when writing in a narrative genre, they write in a more syntactically and lexically complex style, and write more accurately and fluently than when writing in an argumentative genre. In addition, the level of CAF was dependent upon the proficiency levels of participants. Accuracy and fluency were most influenced by genre across all proficiency levels, while syntactic complexity was least influenced.