DOI: 10.5176/2251-3566_L316.71
Authors: Ms. Nadia Tarique Haque
Abstract: This study builds on the work of Cumming et. al (2006) to address the question of whether and how the linguistic and discourse features of essays, written in response to the reading-to-write tasks of the York English Language Test (YELT), vary across proficiency levels. For this investigation, a sample of 50 YELT essays, with YELT scores between 2 and 7, were analyzed for the features of: essay length, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, density of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers, and quality of argument structure. The results showed marked differences across proficiency levels in terms of lexical, syntactic, pragmatic and rhetorical features. In sum, it can be concluded that with the increase in proficiency level, as depicted by YELT scores, the essays were longer and improved in terms of syntactic complexity, density of interactive and interactional metadiscourse markers, and quality of argument structure.
Keywords: L2 assessment, language proficiency, integrated writing tasks, text analysis, discourse analysis
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