Nowadays, many second/foreign language (L2) academic writing instruction programs place a high premium on pre-writing strategies. The current study examined the effect of software-supported concept mapping on lexical diversity (LD) of English learners’ argumentative essays within a process writing framework. Additionally, the relationship between the learners’ LD and their overall writing quality was investigated. To this end, 53 university English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduates were assigned to a computer-aided concept mapping (CACM) and a traditional outlining condition over a span of seven weeks. The CACM group was instructed through the graphic organizer software Inspiration®, whereas the comparison group underwent outlining instruction for planning their writing tasks. Measure of textual lexical diversity (MTLD) was used to assess the so-called D values of the assignments. The results revealed that the CACM group outperformed the outlining group in terms of LD scores. Also, no relationship was found between LD and overall quality of the essays. The findings provide L2 researchers and teachers with insights into understanding the use of CACM strategy in process writing. Moreover, exploiting MTLD afforded our experiment the opportunity to counteract potential pitfalls associated with text size. Further implications for the L2 teacher are also discussed.

中文翻译：

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计算机辅助概念映射对英语学习者词汇多样性的影响：一个过程写作实验

如今，许多第二语言/外语 (L2) 学术写作教学项目都高度重视预写作策略。目前的研究在过程写作框架内检验了软件支持的概念映射对英语学习者议论文的词汇多样性 (LD) 的影响。此外，还研究了学习者的 LD 与其整体写作质量之间的关系。为此，53 名大学英语作为外语 (EFL) 本科生被分配到计算机辅助概念图 (CACM) 和传统大纲条件下，为期七周。CACM小组通过图形组织器软件Inspiration获得指导®，而对照组接受大纲指导来计划他们的写作任务。文本词汇多样性测量（MTLD）用于评估作业的所谓D值。结果表明，CACM 组在 LD 分数方面优于大纲组。此外，未发现 LD 与论文的整体质量之间存在关系。这些发现为 L2 研究人员和教师提供了深入了解 CACM 策略在过程写作中的使用的见解。此外，利用 MTLD 为我们的实验提供了抵消与文本大小相关的潜在缺陷的机会。还讨论了对 L2 教师的进一步影响。