This paper explores the use of pronouns in student academic writing in L1 Norwegian and L2 English. Three aspects of pronoun use are examined: general pronoun frequency, pronoun reference, and the uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’. Students of English are typically advised to avoid being explicitly present in their academic texts (Lysvåg & Stenbrenden 2014), while students writing in Norwegian are often encouraged to use first-person pronouns. However, the results show that both sets of students use explicit self-reference in similar ways. Frequent uses of ‘I’ and ‘we’ are as conductors of research and as guides or navigators assisting the reader through the text.

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The focus of the present study is on thematic progression in texts translated from English into Norwegian. The objective is to analyze and compare thematic progression in an English source text and five different translations of the same English text. (See section 2 for a more detailed description of the material.) According to Danes, "text connexity is represented, inter alia, by thematic progression (TP)" (Danes 1974: 114). Thus the study of thematic progression is interesting because it is one of the factors that contribute to making a text a text, as it were. The study of thematic progression in translated texts adds another dimension to this, insofar as it also sheds light on the translating process. A translation is meant to convey the same meaning as the source text; it should have the same communicative effect. This does not necessarily entail a process of word for word translation, in fact it rarely does. But does the freedom to choose other wordings extend to choice of theme? After all, if the theme is seen as the starting point of the clause, "the peg on which the message is hung" (Halliday 1970:161 as quoted in Fries 1995: 318) and "that with which the clause is concerned" (Halliday 1994: 37), then the choice of a different theme will alter, if only subtly, the meaning/content of the message (Ventola 1995: 88). Such a change will, in turn, cause a change in the surrounding sentences, since it will alter the progression of the argument. Alternatively, is it possible that word order, thematic progression, and the content of the message are not as closely linked as one would expect? It is questions like these that the present study aims to answer.

This paper examines the longitudinal development in noun-phrase complexity in English texts written by Norwegian learners in school years 8-10. The study is based on material from the TRAWL (Tracking Written Learner Language) corpus (Dirdal et al., 2017; Dirdal et al., 2022), comprising longitudinal data from nine pupils. The study tests the hypothesis proposed by Biber et al. (2011) that noun-phrase complexity increases gradually as writers develop, and answers the following research question: To what extent can longitudinal development in noun-phrase complexity in accordance with Biber et al.’s (2011) stages be traced in the written production of intermediate-level Norwegian EFL writers in Years 8-10? The results indicate that there is very little evidence to suggest an increase in sophistication as regards phrasal modification over the three years. Instead, the pupils primarily rely on the types of modifiers that are acquired in early developmental stages, such as attributive adjectives and prepositional phrases. Thus, there should be a greater pedagogical focus on developing pupils’ skills in using more sophisticated noun-phrase modifiers, to prepare them for the future demands placed on their academic-writing skills.

This chapter investigates repeats in native language (L1) Norwegian and interlanguage (IL) English, with the aim of exploring interlanguage fluency variations and the potential existence of individual speaking styles across both L1 and IL production. We manually identified and categorized repeats in six interviews from the (forthcoming) Norwegian component of the LINDSEI corpus (Gilquin et al. 2010) and interviews with the same speakers in their L1. Our results show that repeats occur more frequently in the IL, but there is also evidence of individual variation in speaking styles. We conclude by suggesting some pedagogical implications of our results as related to the teaching and assessment of fluency behavior, emphasizing individual cross-linguistic behavior in the face of processing difficulties.