Linguistic Complexity in Academic Writing: Comparing Tasks in L2 English

Päivi Pietilä
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Abstract

Three different types of academic texts written by advanced learners of English were analysed to discover whether they differed from each other in terms of syntactic and lexical complexity. The writing tasks differed in formality and personal involvement. The results were in accordance with earlier studies on L2 writing, in that the most formal texts, the MA thesis conclusions, did not contain any more subordination than the less formal texts. By the same token, the thesis texts showed the longest clauses in the data, suggesting a strong reliance on complex phrases. Another feature previously discovered to characterize formal academic L2 writing, the proportion of general academic vocabulary, was also found in the present study to differentiate the formal thesis texts from the less formal text types.
学术写作中的语言复杂性:第二语言任务比较
本文分析了英语高级学习者所写的三种不同类型的学术文本,以发现它们在句法和词汇复杂性方面是否存在差异。写作任务在形式和个人参与方面有所不同。结果与早期对二语写作的研究一致,即最正式的文本,硕士论文的结论,并不比不太正式的文本包含更多的从属关系。出于同样的原因,论文文本显示了数据中最长的从句,表明对复杂短语的强烈依赖。另一个先前发现的表征正式学术二语写作的特征是一般学术词汇的比例,在本研究中也发现了区分正式论文文本和不太正式的文本类型。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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