Communications in Humanities Research
- The Open Access Proceedings Series for Conferences
Communications in Humanities Research
Vol. 11, 31 October 2023
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The Interplay of Linguistic Complexity Measures and Their Relation to the Quality of L2 Argumentative Writing
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Abstract
Previous research revealed that syntactic and lexical complexity is crucial in predicting writing quality. However, measuring these features is difficult because they often interact in unpredictable ways. To address this challenge, measurement practices need to capture a more holistic view. This study aims to explore the integration of the complexity metrics and examines how they relate to L2 writing. A sample of 199 argumentative essays from an in-house English proficiency test was scrutinized using the Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and the Lexical Complexity Analyzer. Factor analysis and Pearson correlation were used for data analysis. The findings indicated that, syntactically, a higher frequency and richness of coordinate phrases were associated with superior L2 writing quality (r=.27, p<.01). Lexically, verb variation (r=.186), transformations of the number of different words measures (r=.241) and noun & mod variation (r=.233) were found to be valid indicators of L2 writing quality. However, different from previous research on narrative writing, verb sophistication is found to have no significant correlation with argumentative writing scores. It indicates that the genre of L2 production is a variable that may affect the validity of verb sophistication as a descriptor of L2 performance.
Keywords
syntactic and lexical complexity, second language writing, writing performance, argumentative essays
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Data Availability
The datasets used and/or analyzed during the current study will be available from the authors upon reasonable request.
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- Volume Title
- Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Educational Innovation and Philosophical Inquiries
- ISBN (Print)
- 978-1-83558-045-5
- ISBN (Online)
- 978-1-83558-046-2
- Published Date
- 31 October 2023
- Series
- Communications in Humanities Research
- ISSN (Print)
- 2753-7064
- ISSN (Online)
- 2753-7072
- DOI
- 10.54254/2753-7064/11/20231365
- Copyright
- 31 October 2023
- Open Access
- This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited