The purpose of the current dissertation is to map the relationships between first language (L1), writing quality, and syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and fluency (CALF) in second language (L2) writing. CALF are characteristics of language production that have been of significant interest in L2 writing research for the past few…

Using a lexical decision task, Wolter and Yamashita (2015) showed that collocations that exist only in L1 but not in L2 were not processed faster than collocations that only exist in L2 but not in L1 or a random combination of two words. This result seems to support the age/order of acquisition effects (Carroll & White, 1973) over Jiang's…

Many empirical findings of previous studies have suggested a connection between motivational factors and L2 writing. Nonetheless, the impact of motivational factors on the genre-based L2 writing has not gained much attention. The present study explored the extent to which the characteristics of two writing tasks involving different genres interact…

Syntactic complexity is an important measure of second language (L2) writing proficiency (Larsen--Freeman, 1978; Lu, 2011). Large-grained indices such as the mean length of T-unit (MLTU) have been used with the most consistency in L2 writing studies (Ortega, 2003). Recently, indices such as MLTU have been criticized, both for the difficulty in…

The present study sought to explore and identify vocabulary learning strategies that lead to the attainment of depth of vocabulary knowledge in a second language. For the purpose, 110 Bulgarian language learners of English took Qian and Schedl's (2004) depth of vocabulary knowledge test and completed a related survey. After dividing the sample…

Multiple test tasks are available for assessing L2 collocation knowledge. However, few studies have investigated the characteristics of a variety of recognition and recall tasks of collocation simultaneously, and most research on L2 collocations has focused on verb-noun and adjective-noun collocations. This study investigates (1) the relative…

In the present study, we take a longitudinal, corpus-based perspective to investigate short-term (over 9 months) linguistic change in the language produced for the spoken and written sections of the "TOEFL iBT"® test by a group of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in China. The goal of the study is to identify patterns that…

The present study explores the relationship between controlled productive knowledge of collocations and L2 proficiency, the role of frequency in controlled productive knowledge of collocations, and the quantifiability of controlled productive collocational knowledge growth alongside L2 proficiency and word frequency levels. A proficiency measure…

One of the major innovations of the "TOEFL iBT"® test is the incorporation of integrated tasks complementing the independent tasks to which examinees respond. In addition, examinees must produce discourse in both modes (speech and writing). The validity argument for the TOEFL iBT includes the claim that examinees vary their discourse in…

For many purposes, it is useful to collect a corpus of texts all produced to the same stimulus, whether to measure performance (as on a test) or to test hypotheses about population differences. This paper examines several methods for measuring similarities in phrasing and content and demonstrates that these methods can be used to identify…