The Influence of The Task Upon Writing Performance

189 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1987.In an effort to determine whether two different topics (a writing task with general information provided and a writing task with narrowly defined specific information provided) will elicit different qualities and syntactic characteristics of writing from a sample of upper college level students, this study raised three major questions: (a) do the two different topics significantly affect students' writing performance in the syntactic characteristics and quality ratings in a testing situation? (b) are the topic effects consistent across different groups of writers (different native-language groups and different academic-major groups)? and (c) do the relationships among different measures of writing skill remain stable across the two different topics?For the purposes of this study, ninety six upper-level college students' writing samples (192 essays) and four different kinds of writing-skill measures (elaboration length, syntactic complexity, analytic scores, and holistic scores) were used. To investigate the topic effect, interaction effect, and relationships, two kinds of analysis methods were used: the repeated measure of analysis of variance method and the correlational analysis method.The results of this study following major points: (a) the general writing task facilitates more elaboration and higher quality in the analytic content/thinking main criteria than the specific writing task, (b) the specific writing task facilitates higher quality in the holistic scoring method, (c) both tasks facilitate almost the same degree of syntactic complexity and the same quality in the analytic organization and style/tone criteria, (d) the interaction of the native-language groups and the topics is significant in the elaboration-length variables, (e) the interaction of the major groups and the topics is significant in the holistic scores, (f) the correlation between the essay-quality variables and the syntactic characteristic variables are stable across topics, and (g) the correlations between the analytic scores and the holistic scores vary from topic to topic.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD