Writing as Thinking: Corpus-based Research into Analytical Thinking Predictive of L2 Writing Quality

Writing as Thinking: Corpus-based Research into Analytical Thinking Predictive of L2 Writing Quality

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A traditional view of writing posits that writing restructures thought. Despite the weight of thinking in writing, empirical investigations have been lacking in identifying the effect of analytical thinking in the L2 writing context. This study thus attempted to delve into the predictability of analytical thinking by going beyond the view of L2 writing as linguistic mastery. To that end, by extracting three-leveled－high v s. mid v s. low－Korean L2 writers’ English compositions from the TOEFL11 corpus officially released by the ETS (2013), this study assessed their L2 writing quality based on the analytical thinking measures generated by Pennebaker’s LIWC2015 suite. The results evidenced that analytical thinking has a robust predictive power of L2 writing quality across all the three paired sub-corpora (high v s. mid, high vs. low, mid vs. low). The results corroborate prior findings that analytical thinkers were better associated with academic performance than dynamic thinkers. Based on the findings, it can be deduced that L2 writing restructures thought just as L1 writing does; thus, analytical thinking matters in L2 writing as in L1 writing. The study will discuss implications for future research into analytical thinking in L2 writing.