Multivocality and Readability in High School English Writing: The Role of Task Type

Abstract

In certain genres of high school English writing, incorporating third-party voices can enrich the content of an essay, while also posing challenges to readability. Drawing on a small learner corpus, this study analyzed writing samples produced by 55 high school English learners across two task types: practical writing and continuation writing. Measures of multivocality and readability were calculated for each essay to examine whether and how the inclusion of third-party voices relates to text readability under different task conditions. The findings are as follows: (1) Overall, continuation writing involved richer multivocal dialogue and exhibited lower reading difficulty. Practical writing showed higher frequencies of proclaim and entertain resources, whereas continuation writing demonstrated higher frequencies of disclaim and attribute resources. (2) As multivocal resources were gradually added, the readability of practical writing followed a pattern of “decrease – increase – decrease.” In contrast, the readability of continuation writing was not affected by multivocality. Practical writing that meets general readability standards tends to avoid using either too few or too many multivocal resources. This study provides empirical evidence on how high school students can use multivocal resources to produce clearer and more readable English essays.