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Group trends and individual variability in writing development: a descriptive grammatical complexity analysis

  • Wenjuan Qin ORCID logo , Huixian Li ORCID logo and Yongyan Zheng ORCID logo EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: September 20, 2023

Abstract

This study aims to examine group trends and individual variability of descriptive Grammatical Complexity (GC) in writing development. A longitudinal sample of 41 high school EFL learners is followed for an academic year (12 waves of data collection), resulting in a corpus of 492 texts, coded for eight descriptive GC features of academic writing. Our analysis reveals different sets of descriptive GC features relevant to capturing group trends and individual variability in writing development. At the group level, two phrasal-level GC features could capture significant changes in group means over time; at the individual level, four types of clausal and phrasal GC features showed significant associations between individual variability over time (measured by Standard Deviation of differences) and gains (as measured by the increase of usage frequency). Findings are discussed with regard to modeling both inter-individual and intra-individual trajectories in writing development and pedagogical implications attuned to both group and individual needs.


Corresponding author: Yongyan Zheng, College of Foreign Languages and Literature, Fudan University, No. 220 Handan Road, Shanghai, 200433, China, E-mail:

Special thanks go to all the research assistants in the Language Education, Acquisition, and Development Laboratory (LEAD Lab) at Fudan University, who collaborated to build and code the longitudinal learner corpus.


Funding source: Shanghai Educational Science Grant

Award Identifier / Grant number: Grant number: C2023221

Funding source: The Youth Innovative Team on Humanities and Social Sciences of Fudan University

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/iral-2023-0011).


Received: 2023-01-14
Accepted: 2023-08-29
Published Online: 2023-09-20
Published in Print: 2024-03-25

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