Volume 62, Issue 1 - Special Issue: Textual Analysis to Inform Language Learning and Teaching; Issue Editors: Wenjuan Qin and Paola Uccelli

This paper introduces Developing analytical writing (DAW), a model of text analysis aimed at capturing how social expectancies of analytical writing become part of students’ linguistic literacy. DAW proposes a multilayer analysis of text features on repeated text production prompted by the same and different topics, control for pedagogical input, and researcher- and reader-based evaluations of text quality. We revise DAW previous implementations that delved into lexical, syntactic-discursive, and structural aspects of analytical essays as indexes for developing writing proficiency. We focus thereafter on a current application of DAW to assess content-related dimensions: explicitness of a central standpoint, flexibility of writers’ positioning, and expression of reflective thinking. Analyses revealed that the probability of explicitness and reflexiveness increases from elementary to higher levels of schooling, while the probability of flexible positioning appeared conditioned by text topic and pedagogical input. The three dimensions showed stronger effect of instruction on high schoolers’ than on elementary and university students’ texts. Regression analyses support a foundational role of development and a significant contribution of the assessed dimensions to an appraisal of text quality. DAW facilitates distinguishing analytical text features that improve in the course of development from those sensitive to pedagogical scaffolding.

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.

Two major research issues for longitudinal investigations are the ‘naturalness’ of the learner language being studied, and the extent to which the research design is truly longitudinal. Regarding the first issue, data for longitudinal studies are usually collected in language classrooms or exams, with the writing tasks/topics being tightly controlled. A major disadvantage is that tasks can be unrepresentative of the writing required in disciplinary content courses. The present study analyzes writing development as it occurs ‘naturally’ in university disciplinary content courses, using four complexity features (i.e., finite adverbial clauses, finite relative clauses, attributive adjectives, and nouns as pre-modifiers) with the goal of comparing the kinds of findings in a True-longitudinal approach, a Quasi-longitudinal approach, and a Case study approach. This close examination of writing development that controlled for discipline and task showed an increase in development as measured by these linguistic indicators.

Mean dependency distance (MDD) and mean hierarchical distance (MHD) are two linguistic measures used in dependency syntax studies to investigate the syntactic features of compositions written by English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. However, their applicability and validity in differentiating proficiency levels and genre effects among Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) learners remain unknown. This study uses a longitudinal dataset that tracks 110 Chinese JFL learners over 12 months and examines their syntactic development as well as the effects of genres. The results indicate that both MDD and MHD effectively capture developmental and genre effects; moreover, both measures show significantly higher values in argumentative writing than narrative writing. However, the extent of genre effects over time is not the same in MDD and MHD. The findings provide new insights into the developmental characteristics of JFL learners’ interlanguage and may contribute to evaluating syntactic complexity and developing automatic evaluation systems.

This study focuses on connectives, linguistic devices that signal relations between ideas. Connective knowledge varies widely across grades and is known to support reading comprehension and school writing. Despite the important role that connective knowledge plays in reading and writing, few resources exist to support teachers in understanding which connectives to prioritize in Spanish literacy instruction. In this study we combined a secondary analysis of midadolescents’ connective assessment data (810 students in grades 4–8) with a corpus linguistics frequency analysis of connectives in Chilean national science and social studies textbooks (1,079,593 total words), with the goal of generating a pedagogically relevant tool to support the instruction of connectives in Spanish literacy across content areas. To generate the Connective Frequency Bands Tool, we first examined the role of grade and connective type in midadolescents’ connective knowledge. Secondly, we examined associations between students’ knowledge and textual frequencies across content areas for each connective included in the assessment. Finally, informed by midadolescents’ connective knowledge and by the corpus linguistics analysis of science and social studies textbooks from grades 1–8, we generated the Connective Frequency Bands Tool listing connectives frequencies by grade, connective type, and content area.

Lexical complexity has been a key consideration of teaching preparation in determining grade appropriateness of teaching materials. However, the lack of quantified and defined standards for benchmarking lexical complexity has made it difficult for teachers when adapting source texts to target learners. This study has assessed quantitative differences in lexical complexity of exemplar texts at different points of schooling using a range of lexical diversity and sophistication features. The data consists of 2,372 texts from popular curriculum packages adopted from 1 to 12 grades of the English curriculum in China. One-way ANOVAs revealed significant differences in 16 out of 17 lexical complexity indices among different grades. Subsequent post hoc tests identified three lexical diversity features and four sophistication features that helped to differentiate exemplar texts across these 12 grades. These findings on the nature and role of lexical complexity have yielded new insights into the establishment of grade-level benchmarks for material preparation.

As a cover term for the negotiation of propositional information and reader engagement, metadiscourse has gained considerable attention from scholars of academic discourse. Recent studies have extended to previously unexplored structures that realize metadiscourse, such as ‘metadiscursive nouns’ (Jiang and Hyland 2018. Nouns and academic interactions: A neglected feature of metadiscourse. Applied Linguistics 39. 508–531). Among various linguistic resources, verbs are often regarded as a linguistic element undertaking multiple discourse acts and functions in different contexts, with some acts and functions being metadiscursive. Based on previous studies on reporting verbs and functional sentence stems, this study proposes the concept of metadiscursive verb patterns (MVPs) and examines this linguistic resource in a self-built MedDEAP corpus of five million words, a clinical medicine English research article corpus consisting of 18 sub-disciplines. We conducted an intradisciplinary investigation into MVPs to analyze their structural and functional variations across the sub-disciplines of medical academic English. The findings revealed that most MVPs exhibit a preference for some sub-disciplines, and a few sub-disciplines reflect certain characteristic genre features in the use of certain MVPs. It is shown that medical academic discourse is characterized by methodological and conceptual cross-fertilization. Hence, variation in MVPs is a natural linguistic representation of interdisciplinary synergy. Based on our findings, we conclude by addressing the pedagogical implications for proper use of MVPs in academic writing.