Complex noun phrases (NP) are central to mature academic writing and often a focus of explicit teaching. The National Curriculum in England, for example, requires specific components of NP complexity to be taught at specific educational stages. However, the evidence base for such practices is unclear. Research on the emergence of NP components is…

This study proposed a set of measures for assessing noun phrase (NP) complexity in second language (L2) Chinese writing and compared the predictive power of these measures for L2 Chinese writing quality to that of a set of syntactic complexity measures based on the topic-comment unit (TC-unit). Our data consisted of 101 narratives written by…

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 cross-sectional study compares the written language of Thai EFL students in their first two years of university study. First- and second-year students (N = 170) wrote opinion paragraphs by hand in response to six prompts. Using automated textual analysis tools, clausal (subordination), phrasal (coordinated phrases and complex nominals), and…

Since the 1990s, grammatical complexity is a topic that has received considerable attention in various fields of applied linguistics, such as English for academic purposes, second language acquisition, language testing, and second language writing (Bulte & Housen, 2012). Many scholars in applied linguistics have recently argued that…

To achieve a high level of language fluency, learners need to possess sufficient collocational competence. However, collocation is considered a problematic area for many EFL learners, partly because of its arbitrariness. To gain more insight into the problems involving learners' productive collocational skills, the current study examines lexical…

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,…

Grammatical and lexical cohesion are necessary conditions to guarantee a text's coherence (Halliday and Hasan 1976). Grammatical cohesion is classified into four types of relation: reference, conjunction, substitution, and ellipsis. This study aims to investigate the use of the cohesive device of reference in written discourse produced by…

This paper examines the effects of attended and unattended demonstratives on text processing, comprehension, and writing quality in two studies. In the first study, participants (n = 45) read 64 mini-stories in a self-paced reading task and identified the main referent in the clauses. The sentences varied in the type of demonstratives (i.e., this,…

This study aims to clearly diagnose EFL "students' writing strengths and weaknesses." I adapted a diagnostic framework which comprises multiple writing components associated with three main dimensions of second language writing. The essays of 304 English learners who enrolled in an English language program were double-rated by 13…

This study is an attempt to investigate the effect of direct and indirect feedback on the writing performance of Iranian learners of Japanese as a foreign language. During one academic semester, three indirect feedback types including underlining, coding and translation were used as well as direct type of feedback in order to see which one makes a…

Despite its importance of academic language, research on academic language is often limited to academic vocabulary and focused on the English language learners. Informed by systemic functional linguistics, this study examined adolescents' use of academic language and the relationships between its use and students' reading ability and their writing…

In a study designed as a pilot project to test a taxonomy of noun phrases (NPs) and indicate results to be expected from a larger subsequent survey, 13 essays from a basic writing class and 10 essays from an advanced composition class were analyzed for four NP types: (1) those requiring earlier text information for full interpretation, (2) those…