Integrated writing across conflicting L2 texts: The effects of prior beliefs on perspectivism and propositional content

Abstract

In light of the ever-increasing predominance of sources that present conflicting information on socio-scientific issues, constructing integrated written representations across such sources has become a routine practice for information users, particularly in academic contexts. Evidence accumulates that readers’ pre-existing beliefs affect source comprehension. Since source comprehension has been documented to significantly affect integrated writing task performance, the present study examined how participants’ prior beliefs interact with their integrated written representations of documents that present divergent standpoints on a controversy. The study, more specifically, examined perspectivism and propositional content in integrated summaries written by English as a Foreign Language (EFL) participants across documents that presented perspectives contradicting or aligning with their pre-existing beliefs. The results revealed that perspectives adopted by participants in their integrated summaries were largely biased towards their pre-existing beliefs. The results further indicated a strong bias towards the participants’ pre-existing stances on the controversy in the propositional content of the integrated writing task. Additionally, there was a significant difference in the propositional content of integrated summaries that adopted different perspectives. Furthermore, perceived plausibility judgements of the information were found to moderate the propositional content of the integrated summaries. • Propositional content of integrated summaries are biased towards prior beliefs. • Perspectives taken in integrated summaries are biased towards pre-existing beliefs. • Perceived information plausibility moderate belief-biased written representations.