A dynamic usage based perspective on L2 writing

Linguistic complexity in second language development: variability and variation at advanced stages

“…25 Also, in Verspoor et al (2012) the number of finite dependent clauses was found to be a good discriminator at the lower levels of L2 proficiency of L1 Dutch learners. Here we want to test our assumption that at the highest levels of proficiency these types of constructions are no longer good indicators of development as learners start using more non-finite clauses and longer noun phrases.…”

“…Several of the measures selected were based on Verspoor et al (2012), who compared English texts written by L1 Dutch learners at five different proficiency levels from beginning to high intermediate. Types of sentences and lexical diversity measures discriminated well between all five levels.…”

“…Spoelman and Verspoor (2010) traced the writing development of Finnish from the beginner to intermediate L2 level and found that as the learner's language became more complex, there was a clear competitive relation between noun phrase complexity and sentence complexity, suggesting that during one phase of development, attention was focused either on the noun phrase or the sentence. Furthermore, in a cross-sectional study across five levels of proficiency from beginning to high intermediate L2 learners, Verspoor et al (2012) showed that between different proficiency levels different subsystems of the language progressed. At the lower end differences between levels were found in specific measures in the lexicon, in the middle levels the growth was found especially in specific syntactic measures, and at the end differences were found in specific lexical measures again.…”

“…However, several studies from a dynamic perspective have also pointed to the fact that some measures show less variability or variation and may be more useful in tracing general development in linguistic complexity. Verspoor et al (2012) pointed out that there were five broad measures that showed almost linear progression or regression across proficiency levels: fewer simple sentences (representing sentence complexity), fewer present tenses (representing verb phrase complexity), fewer errors (representing accuracy), increased type-token ratio (representing lexical diversity) and chunk use (total number of authentic expressions). It was argued that these particular measures showed more linear development because they were all based on averages of a great number of instances.…”

Gesture-Verbal Utterances From the Cognitive Perspective

“…It was first suggested within linguistics by Moore & Carling (1982) and has been supported by a number of cognitive linguists (see, for instance, Croft & Cruse, 2004;Koskela, 2014;Kugler, 2014;Lakoff & Sweetser, 1994;Paradis, 2011;Tylén, Fusaroli, Bundgaard & Østergaard, 2013;Verspoor, Schmid & Xu, 2012).…”