This article reports on the development and validation of the English Diagnostic Test of Grammar (EDiT Grammar) for Japanese learners of English. From among the many aspects of grammar, this test focuses on the knowledge of basic English noun phrases (NPs), especially their internal structures, because previous research has indicated the…

This article presents a study of written development in English as a foreign language produced in a content and language integrated learning (CLIL) environment. The texts analysed, from history classes, were collected annually over the four-year obligatory junior secondary education program from the same students (aged 12 to 16), in two state…

This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not…

Effective writing is to some degree characterised by the ability to use complex grammatical structures. However, grammatical complexity is poorly defined in linguistics and related disciplines such as literacy. This empirical study examined the notion of grammatical complexity and its relevance to literacy. Complexity is multifaceted, so for…