The Topic Choice Effect on L2 College Learners’Writing Performance

Students' performance in a test can be very different depending on topics and test methods, when the limited time is assigned in particular. This research aimed to investigate the effect of topic choice on Korean EFL learners' writing by employing a computational analysis. 32 college students participated in the study and were asked to write two essays in two different conditions, one imposed topic vs. several topic choices conditions. A variety of linguistic features in the students' writing were analyzed with Range32, and a web-based automatic lexical and syntactic complexity analyzer. The results have shown that topic choice has an impact on the vocabulary use in the written products. Lexical sophistication and lexical variation were revealed to be statistically significant between the conditions. The number of vocabulary included in the General Service List (GSL) and Academic Word List (AWL) increased in the condition of topic choice. In the comparison of the mean values, the fluency in topic choice was significantly higher than in the imposed topic in the number of words, while other measures of fluency did not demonstrate significant difference. The syntactic complexity was not shown to be significantly different between the two conditions.