Week 3 (I) Descriptive details -- cognitive processes in L1 and L2

          In this week, my teaching foci were teaching "descriptive details". Since autobiography writing is a kind of narrative or descriptive writing, descriptive details allows readers to create mental images to "see," "feel," "experience" what the writers undergone.
          To create descriptive details in writing, I taught students to use: 1) modifiers, including adjectives and adverbs, 2) vivid words, including vivid verbs and nouns, 3) sensory details, including words relating to smell, taste, sight, feeling, and sound, 4) similes and metaphors,  5) conversations, and 6) the five journalistic "W"s.
          After my lecture, I asked my students to do some exercise by giving them some sentence skeletons as follows:
1. When she buys clothes, she is like ___________________
2. Kobe Bryant is as tall as _____________
3. My best friend sings like _______________
4. She is as quiet as _____________
I encouraged the students to apply the above 5 strategies and use their L1 to revise and complete the sentences by providing my answer of sentence 1 as an example:

"When she buys clothes, she is like______" => "End of season sales have successfully launched shopping insanity, and crazy shoppers stormed into shops clambering over each other to snap up deals. My sister armed with coupons to buy clothes, and she got into the frantic crowds like a starving wolf searching for prey."
          I also asked students to discuss their completed sentences with their peers in whatever language they felt comfortable with in order to brainstorm more ideas for revision. Afterwords, I asked two students to share their revised sentences. The two students' sentences are as follow:
          Student A: My best friend sings like a chirping golden oriole.
          Student B: When my mom was in an ecstasy of shopping, she is like an eager hunter.

[My observation and reflection]:
          1. Cooped thoughts. When students were doing the exercise, it seemed to be difficult for them to think out of the cliched box from making corny sentences, such as "Kobe Bryant is as tall as a tree" or "My friend sings like a bird." Even though when I asked them to think in Chinese, most of them were still confined by the English skeleton sentences or cooped up in the syntactic stratum of English. The two  students' sentences account for the cognitive constraint. More evidence was observed. I asked one student to complete sentence 4. Because she showed embarrassment and stuttered, I suggested her using Chinese to help her thought mapping. She murmured in Mandarin, "She is as quiet as....." "She is very quiet like a...." Then eventually, she came up with a sentence "She is so quiet like a mute person." She felt a bit frustrated that she was not able to make a satisfied and "splendid" sentence.
         It looks like once the L2 syntax is primed and when L2 outputs are preset as a pursuing goal, even though one is allowed to use his/her L1, L2 still predominates one's working memory and inhibits L1 process. Lack of L2 linguistic resources seems to be one of the major reasons causing thought constraints. Although some vocabulary may emerge automatically from L1 to compensate L2 defects, muse of thoughts doesn't flow in automatically when switching to L1. One student said that her brain was totally blank in English, but when switched to Chinese it was slowly awaken, yet very slowly.

• Maybe next time, I can create a L1 context first by writing sentence skeletons in Chinese and asking students to compose in Chinese. Then ask them to transfer the emerged ideas into English. I hypothesize that they can be more creative and free-thought in their L1. 
• Shuttling between L1 and L2 though sounds like an automatic reaction, L1 doesn't transfer to compensate L2 deficit automatically. It looks to me that L1 and L2 codes, though are integrated in one repertoire, they receive different priming from the contexts. When the context of a task requires L2, L1 is automatically inhibited, which demands extra efforts to be retrieved. That means, shuttling between L1 and L2 doesn't take place easily or automatically but demands time for shuttling, and "certain threshold level of" training and practice. However, why the contextual priming activates L1 L2 differently if they are integrated together? Would it suggest that L1 and L2 are partially separated into different linguistic systems but have some parts overlap?? 

Cook (2012) http://www.viviancook.uk/Writings/Papers/KeyIssues.htm