Effects of task type on morphosyntactic complexity across proficiency

Abstract

This study investigates the effect of instructional design on (morpho)syntactic complexity in second language (L2) writing development. We operationalised instructional design in terms of task type and empirically based the investigation on a large subcorpus (669,876 writings by 119,960 learners from 128 tasks at all Common European Framework of Reference for Languages levels) of the EF-Cambridge Open Language Database (EFCAMDAT; Geertzen, Alexopoulou and Korhonen 2014).
 First, the 128 task prompts were manually categorised for task type (e.g. argumentation, description). Next, developmental trajectories of syntactic complexity from A1 to C2 were established using a variety of global (e.g. mean length of clause) and specific (e.g. non-third person singular present tense verbs) measures extracted using natural language processing techniques. The effects of task type were analysed using the categorisation from the first step. Finally, tasks that showed atypical behaviour for a measure given their task type were explored qualitatively.
 Our results partially confirm earlier experimental and corpus-based studies (e.g. subordination associated with argumentative tasks). Going beyond, our large-scale data-driven analysis made it possible to identify specific measures that were naturally prompted by instructional design (e.g. narrations eliciting wh-phrases). We discuss which measures typically align with certain task types and highlight how instructional design relates to L2 developmental trajectories over time.

Examining the potential influence of crosslinguistic lexical similarity on word-choice transfer in L2 English

“…The strong task effects that were found in this study contribute to the growing evidence on the role of these effects in L2 lexical choices [39,45,[52][53][54][55]. This highlights the importance of controlling for such effects (e.g., the purpose or context of production) when analyzing L2 lexical choices, particularly in learner corpora, where they can often play a substantial role.…”

“…Most learners only had a single text in the sample (the mean number of texts per learner was 1.36 in the first subcorpus and 1.41 in the second). Multiple texts per learner were included to achieve sufficient coverage of the sample, in line with prior studies on the EFCAMDAT [e.g., 39 , 44 , 45 ]. See the “Sample information” document in the OSF repository for more details (under “Number of texts per learner”).…”

Beginning L2 complexity development in CLIL and non-CLIL secondary education

“…However, in another study we do explicitly analyse patterns of variation in the same data set examined here (Bulté and Housen 2018). Third, in the structure of our data set 'measurement occasion' coincided with 'prompt' , making it hard to tease apart the effects of writing prompt and topic on the one hand, and time effects on the other (see Michel et al 2019). Fourth, even though the quantitative measures used in this study were chosen to obtain a comprehensive yet parsimonious picture of L2 complexity, more and other complexity measures could be chosen that tap into different layers, components and dimensions of the linguistic complexity construct.…”

Proficiency at the lexis–grammar interface: Comparing oral versus written French exam tasks

“…. .”), especially relative to more narrative- or descriptive-type tasks (e.g., Lu, 2011; Michel et al, 2019). This functional similarity makes these two tasks more comparable than the other TEF tasks, which are more narrative or descriptive in nature (e.g., newspaper article, telephone inquiry to request information).…”