Many students with learning disabilities struggle with sentence writing fluency, the skill of quickly and accurately generating words that follow rules of semantics, spelling, syntax, and usage within sentence structures understandable to readers. Students who struggle with sentence writing fluency may face difficulty fully expressing their ideas…

Background: We examined linguistic features in fourth graders' narrative and opinion writing and their relations to writing quality. We analysed narrative and opinion essays in terms of lexical sophistication and diversity as well as syntactic complexity, syntactic accuracy, and morphological complexity. Methods: Data were from English-speaking…

Background: We examined linguistic features in fourth graders' narrative and opinion writing and their relations to writing quality. We analysed narrative and opinion essays in terms of lexical sophistication and diversity as well as syntactic complexity, syntactic accuracy, and morphological complexity. Methods: Data were from English-speaking…

This longitudinal case study from a Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) perspective touches upon an under-researched issue: L1 development over the lifespan. Levinson (1978) predicts three stages in adulthood: early, mid and late, with a decline in late adulthood. We examine Diane Larsen-Freeman's publications over a period of 50 years (from age…

One of the critiques of proficiency as defined by scales, such as that of ACTFL, is its lack of grounding in linguistic realities. Measures of complexity, accuracy, and fluency provide a route in which proficiency can be quantitatively measured by identifying linguistic correlates (see Brown et al., 2017; Long et al., 2012). This project aimed to…

Language immersion programs seek to develop multilingual, multiliterate individuals able to engage with academic content. Studies of immersion students' language development provide details regarding language proficiency and accuracy, yet they generally do not address how features of written, academic language, for example, syntactic and lexical…

Studies analysing the metatalk generated in collaborative writing (CW) tasks have primarily targeted secondary or adult students who wrote either in L1 or L2, and have seldom examined the process of their writing in two languages. Furthermore, these analyses have mostly focused on accuracy discussions and have ignored discussions aimed at making…

We conducted a meta-analysis to investigate reading-writing relations. Beyond the overall relation, we systematically investigated moderation of the relation as a function of linguistic grain size (word reading and spelling versus reading comprehension and written composition), measurement of reading comprehension (e.g., multiple choice,…

Second language (L2) writing has been determined to be influenced by what is read, with language learners tending to borrow words and short phrases from input texts while writing (e.g., Wang & Wang, 2015). This phenomenon is referred to as lexical alignment. Only one empirical study has investigated the influence that the linguistic complexity…