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.
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).
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Articles in the same Issue
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- Editorial
- Introduction: textual analysis to inform language learning and teaching
- Research Articles
- Internal and external appraisals of analytical writing. A proposal for assessing development and potential improvement
- Group trends and individual variability in writing development: a descriptive grammatical complexity analysis
- Exploring individual longitudinal development in a corpus of ‘natural’ disciplinary writing: what could it mean for teaching?
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Introduction: textual analysis to inform language learning and teaching
- Research Articles
- Internal and external appraisals of analytical writing. A proposal for assessing development and potential improvement
- Group trends and individual variability in writing development: a descriptive grammatical complexity analysis
- Exploring individual longitudinal development in a corpus of ‘natural’ disciplinary writing: what could it mean for teaching?
- The development of syntactic complexity of Chinese JFL learners based on Mean Dependency Distance and Mean Hierarchical Distance
- Connective Frequency Bands informed by textbook frequencies and midadolescents’ knowledge of connectives: a tool to support Spanish literacy instruction across content areas
- Lexical complexity in exemplar EFL texts: towards text adaptation for 12 grades of basic English curriculum in China
- Sub-disciplinary variation of metadiscursive verb patterns in English research articles: a functional analysis of medical discourse