Abstract
The effect of multiword sequences on L2 writing proficiency among different genres and their relations to vocabulary levels are understudied. In this study 60 indices of bigrams and trigrams related to frequency, association, range and proportion of frequent n-grams were employed to analyze 600 rated English essays and 600 rated English request letters composed by Chinese high school students. We investigated whether there were similar or varied n-gram measures predictive of their holistic scores among the two genres and the relationship between specific multiword combinations connected to the n-gram measures predictive of writing scores and their vocabulary levels in the Chinese national English curriculum. The results showed that three pairs of similar n-gram measures predicted the holistic scores among these two types of writings, but five indices were uniquely associated with letter scores. Additionally, in both genres, higher mean MI associations in more proficient compositions were significantly correlated to more multiword combinations containing words from college and graduate levels in advanced writings than in intermediate writings. This study contributed to a better understanding of the relations among word associations, vocabulary levels and writing proficiency among high school student English writings.
Published Version
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