Comparing the Writings and Attitudes of High School EFL Students by Proficiency Levels

This study compares the writings and attitudes of Korean high school students by proficiency levels. The participants were 100 second-year students from a high school located in a metropolitan city. A source text was used to facilitate the participants’ writing. Considering the possible effect of the topic, the participants were divided into two groups (Text A & Text B groups), and each group read a source text on a different topic. To examine the effect of English proficiency on writing, each text group was divided into two sub-groups based on their performance in the National English Ability Test. A questionnaire survey was also conducted after the writing task to examine each proficiency group’s attitudes toward writing. Analysis of the writing samples used CohMetrix 3.0, focusing on lexical proficiency and syntactic complexity with six indices of writing. According to the result, the two proficiency groups using Text A showed a significant difference only in NW, whereas those using Text B showed a significant difference in NW/S and LE as well as NW. The survey result showed that the two proficiency groups shared common attitudes toward writing, with some differences only in the degree. Based on the result, the study recommends some strategies for writing instruction in high school English classes.