The Effect of Model Essays on Complexity and Fluency of L2 Learners’ Writing Performance

Abstract

The present study aimed at finding out whether model essays have an impact on the development of complexity and fluency of L2 learners’ writing performance. In order to achieve this research aim, 25 students majoring various subjects were recruited from a university in Korea. The participants were asked to write argumentative essays and to underline on whatever they noticed while comparing their original texts with the model essays. The first and the last essays from each participant were selected, and different measures of complexity and fluency were employed in order to examine L2 writing improvement. The results showed that the model essays had an impact on the learners’ L2 writing performance in terms of syntactic complexity and fluency while no significant improvement occurred in lexical complexity. The findings indicate that while analysing model essays, L2 learners may be aware of various aspects of written language such as vocabulary and sentence structure. As being exposed to model essays as written feedback, learners may have more knowledge to create L2 texts through the process of noticing in L2 production.