The present paper employs a corpus-based approach to track the longitudinal language development of university
students. Compared to many other longitudinal studies, the present study tracks development over a relatively long period of time
(two years) for a relatively large group of students (N = 22). However, the most important difference from
previous research is that the study explores the linguistic characteristics of disciplinary writing, across levels of education
and academic disciplines, investigating the writing tasks required for disciplinary content courses over two years of university
education. We focus on grammatical complexity features associated with the hypothesized stages of development proposed in Biber et al. (2011). Methodologically, the study proposes research designs and
statistical approaches that permit investigation of longitudinal development in an unbalanced corpus of natural texts. And
linguistically, the results generally support the hypothesized stages of development, documenting a decline in the use of
dependent clause complexity features and an increase in the use of phrasal complexity features. As such, the study adds to the
growing body of research that emphasizes the importance of phrasal complexity in the development of academic writing.
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Biber, D. & Gray, B.
2016Grammatical Complexity in Academic English: Linguistic Change in Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Biber, D., Gray, B., & Poonpon, K.
2011Should we use characteristics of conversation to measure grammatical complexity in L2 writing development?. TESOL Quarterly, 45(1), 5–35.
Biber, D., Gray, B., & Poonpon, K.
2013Pay attention to the phrasal structures: Going beyond T-units. TESOL Quarterly, 471, 192–201.
Biber, D., Gray, B. & Staples, S.
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Biber, D., Gray, B., Staples, S., & Egbert, J.
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Biber, D., Reppen, R., & Staples, S.
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Bulté, B. & Housen, A.
2018Syntactic complexity in L2 writing: Individual pathways and emerging group trends. International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 281, 147–164.
Carter, R. & McCarthy, M.
2006Cambridge Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connor-Linton, J. & Polio, C.
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Crosthwaite, P.
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2014Exploring multiple profiles of L2 writing using multi-dimensional analysis. Journal of Second Language Writing, 261, 80–95.
Gardner, S., Nesi, H., & Biber, D.
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Bychkovska, Tetyana
2021. Effects of explicit instruction on noun phrase production in L2 undergraduate writing. Journal of English for Academic Purposes 54 ► pp. 101040 ff.
2022. Noun phrasal complexity in ESL written essays under a constructed-response task: Examining proficiency and topic effects. Assessing Writing 51 ► pp. 100595 ff.
Zhang, Meixiu & Wenting Chen
2022. Assessing collaborative writing in the digital age: An exploratory study. Journal of Second Language Writing► pp. 100868 ff.
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