81012486

open access

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A Study Synthesis on the Relationship between Second Language Writing Performance and Text Features : Focusing on Text-based Measures and Study Features

Learner Corpus Studies in Asia and the World

5

1-24

神戸大学国際コミュニケーションセンター

2020-12-21

2020-12-21

This study synthesized past studies that investigated the relationship between second language (L2) writing performance and the text-based features in written text, to identify which aspects of L2 writing have been focused on in the literature and how those research interests have changed. This study also examined the features of the primary studies to identify any imbalance in our knowledge of L2 writing performance and development. After a thorough literature search with numerous search engines and examinations of relevant journals, this study synthesized 122 studies with a total sample size of 18,072. An eligible study had to report correlations between the overall quality of texts and at least one text-based objective or subjective measure. The overall L2 writing quality was judged by human raters using holistic or composite scores of analytic rating dimensions. The results showed that lexical and syntactic complexity, fluency, and accuracy in L2 texts have been intensively examined in past studies. In the 1980s and 1990s, accuracy was the most examined aspect of L2 writing, but in the 2010s exceeding numbers of studies have examined linguistic complexity, fluency, and cohesion in L2 texts in comparison to the overall text quality. The analysis also revealed that imbalance exists among studies in various features, especially regarding participants’ ages and target languages. This study also considers future studies that are needed in this field.

writing assessment

紀要論文