Abstract:
The reactivity of think-alouds (TAs) (i.e., their effects on thinking) has remained an inevitable concern whenever their use is considered or evaluated. This paper reports findings from a study that involved 85 Chinese sophomores, who, having received some instruction in diction, and then written a narrative in English as a baseline task, completed a similar main writing task, either silently or while think-ing aloud. Between-groups differences were analysed in 20 measures of writing per-pormance. TA was found to significantly impair only two measures, lexical diver-sity and nondysfluencies. TA may have constrained newly developed, still unstable thoughts that were perceived as peripheral, apart from its effects on fluency. Fur-ther analyses revealed differential effects. Those with high working memory capac-ity (WMC), especially high reading span, were most affected in lexical diversity, while those with low WMC experienced a significant decline in organization. The participants’ reflections in a follow-up questionnaire, analyzed inductively, show their diverse feelings about the effects of TA, its processing load emerging as the likely primary reactivity-causing factor. Results suggest that, although the reactivity of TAs is small, participants’ between- and within-individual differences should be duly attended to in conducting TAs in second language writing and writing research.
