Unfolding models are frequently used to develop scales for measuring attitudes. Recently, unfolding models have been applied to examine rater severity and accuracy within the context of rater-mediated assessments. One of the problems in applying unfolding models to rater-mediated assessments is that the substantive interpretations of the latent…

Broadly defined, academic language (AL) is a set of lexical-grammatical norms and registers commonly used in educational and academic discourse. Mastery of academic language in writing is an important aspect of writing instruction and assessment. The purpose of this study was to use Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to examine the extent to…

This study examined the extent of perspective taking and language features represented in secondary students' text-based analytical writing. We investigated: (1) whether perspective taking is related to writing quality, accounting for language features in writing; (2) whether students' English learner status is related to perspectives represented…

This study examined the extent of perspective taking and language features represented in secondary students' text-based analytical writing. We investigated (1) whether perspective taking is related to writing quality, accounting for language features in writing; (2) whether students' English learner status is related to perspectives represented…

This study describes academic literacy development during mid-adolescence, when learners need to adjust to the demands of academic discourse as a gateway to linguistic adulthood. Unlike most research to date, which is cross-sectional and detached from disciplinary content, this study provides a two-year longitudinal description of academic…

This study examines the linguistic complexity of Spanish as a second language (L2) in learners' essays across proficiency levels at two timelines of a composition class during a college semester. Data comes from 22 L2 learners of Spanish enrolled in two sections of a third-year composition class at the college level, who were assigned nine…

Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by…

From the perspective of complexity theory and based on Robinson's Cognition Hypothesis and the Triadic Componential Framework, this paper investigated the effect of manipulating task complexity along resource-dispersing dimension on L2 written performance. The results showed that: 1) Significant interactive effects were found between the two…

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…

In measuring learners' productivity in writing and speaking, there is a formulation known as syntactic and lexical complexity. This study investigates whether there is a difference in syntactic and lexical complexity between L1 and L2 writings or not. This study is quantitative research which employ Web-Based Lexical Complexity Analyser and…

This study investigates the influence of a grammatical reconstruction task on talk and subsequent individual writing. In a South Korean university, two classes alternated learning conditions, between 'read-summarize-write' and 'read-reconstruct-write'. In the summarize condition, small groups collaborated to create a summary of the reading; in the…

In the past three decades, the construct of second language (L2) writing complexity has been theorized and refined in both second language acquisition (SLA) (Crossley, 2020; Housen, De Clercq, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2019; Lu, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) research (Byrnes, 2009; Ryshina-Pankova, 2015;…

Syntactic complexity is a crucial aspect of linguistic proficiency and thus understanding and supporting such development in learners is a keen concern for language teachers. Research conducted has shown growing sophistication of noun phrase structures by writers of different abilities in academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010; Liu & Li,…

The continuation task, a new form of reading-writing integrated task in which test-takers read an incomplete story and then write the continuation and ending of the story, has been increasingly used in writing assessment, especially in China. However, language-test developers' understanding of the effects of important task-related factors on…

Purpose: Critical thinking pervades formal educational benchmarks in the United States, including the Common Core State Standards. However, little information is available on how it develops. Hence, the primary purpose of this study was to examine the development of critical thinking in adolescents using a written language-sampling task. We also…