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…

Lexical bundles (LBs) are frequent groups of words that appear repeatedly in different academic texts. A plethora of research has explored their distribution and usage in general, particularly in academic texts. However, to our knowledge, the extent of research investigating LBs in the discussion sections of Medical Research Articles (MRAs) is…

This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness,…

Students' writing proficiency is measured through holistic and analytical ratings in writing assessment; however, recent studies suggest that measurement of syntactic complexity in second language writing research has become an effective measure of writing proficiency. Within this paradigm, we investigated how automated measurement of syntactic…

To test the predictive power of the SSARC (stabilize, simplify, automatize, reconstruct, and complexify) model of pedagogic task sequencing in second language (L2) writing development, the present study explores the performance of written decision-making tasks with varied levels of cognitive complexity in a simple-to-complex sequence in comparison…

Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L2 learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on…

Although studies on written feedback have confirmed the effectiveness of multiple sources of feedback in promoting learners' accuracy, much remains to be discovered about its impact on other aspects of language development. Concerns were raised with regard to the possible unfavourable impact of feedback on the complexity of students' writing which…

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…

Syntactic complexity has been extensively approached in the fields of corpus linguistics and academic discourse studies. However, works focusing on disciplinary variation in terms of linguistic complexity and comparison of professional and novice academic writing are scarce. Addressing these issues is likely to have important implications for…

This exploratory research presents the implementation and evaluation of the effects of integrating corpus consultation with business English writing instruction. The subjects consisted of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners enrolled in two undergraduate business English writing classes. Two groups of EFL students were randomly assigned,…

This experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest design, compared the effects of focused direct written corrective feedback and additional writing practice on L2 learners' written syntactic complexity. The participants were 60 Iranian elementary EFL learners, whose L2 proficiency as well as L2 writing syntactic complexity and accuracy…

Many studies that have investigated the educational value of online machine translation (MT) in second language (L2) writing generally report significant improvements after MT use, but no study as of yet has comprehensively analyzed the effectiveness of MT use in terms of various measures in syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity, and…

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the…

While learners may have access to reference tools during second language (L2) writing, the latest developments in machine translation (MT), such as "Google Translate" requires examination as to how using the tool may factor into the second language learners' writing products. To this end, the purpose of this study was to examine how MT…