Phrasal complexity in academic writing: A comparison of abstracts written by graduate students and expert writers in applied linguistics

Ansarifar, Ahmad; Shahriari, Hamid; Pishghadam, Reza

doi:10.1016/j.jeap.2017.12.008

Cited by 109 publications

(67 citation statements)

References 36 publications

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“…One line of research has analyzed the macro structures and organizational patterns of the major sections (i.e., Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion; IMRD) in RAs in various fields of study (e.g., Kanoksilapatham, 2015;Sheldon, 2013;Swales, 1990;Ruiying & Allison, 2003; among others). The other line of studies within which the current study falls has examined textual features and specific linguistic devices in different academic disciplines (e.g., Ansarifar, et al, 2018;Gray, 2015;Le & Harrington, 2015;Staples, et al, 2016). Despite ongoing interest in different sections of RAs, one of the key but less charted segments, compared to other typical sections, is the results section (Lim, 2011b;Sheldon, 2013;Williams, 1999).…”

Section: Ra and Studies On The Results Sections Of Rasmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Círculo de Lingüística Aplicada a la Comunicación ISSN: 1576-4737 http://dx.doi.org/10.5209/clac.70573 academic writing, five grammatical features of structural compression, that is, pre-modifying adjectives, pre-modifying nouns, nominalizations, appositive noun phrases, and post-modifying prepositional phrases are reported to be the hallmarks of present-day academic prose, and a good number of the recent studies in the field of Applied Linguistics have focused on such features ( see Table 2) (e.g., Ansarifar, Shahriari, & Pishghadam, 2018;Lan & Sun, 2019;Noguera-Díaz & Pérez-Paredes, 2018;Ruan, 2018;Staples, Egbert, Gray, & Biber, 2016). Chiefly embedded in complex noun phrase constructions, these five specific grammatical resources appear to be increasing in frequency in academic texts (Biber & Gray, 2011, 2016Gray & Biber, 2018).…”

Section: Artículosmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…More recently, in a corpus-based investigation into phrasal complexity, Ansarifar et al (2018) compared three categories of abstracts produced by the Iranian graduate students of applied linguistics (MA and PhD students) and the expert writers from the same discipline in terms of noun modifiers. They found that the MA writings varied considerably from the expert writings in terms of four types of modifiers.…”

Section: Research Articles and Phrasal Complexity Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Phrasal Discourse Style in Cross-Disciplinary Writing: A Comparison of Phrasal Complexity Features in the Results Sections of Research Articles

Parviz¹,

Jalilifar²,

Don³

2020

CLAC

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The present study aimed at exploring how research article writers from two academic disciplines exploit phrasal complexity features (PCFs) to verbalize the results sections of research articles with the eventual aim of assisting advanced EFL writers with their composition strategies. To this end, following a manual search, 200 empirical research articles in the fields of Applied Linguistics and Physics were comparatively examined. Due to the low rate of success of tagging programs in identifying the occurrences of PCFs, the datasets were also manually analyzed. The results revealed that the research article writers drew upon three high-frequency phrasal complexity features, namely, pre-modifying adjectives, post-modifying prepositional phrases, and nominalizations. The study also revealed that the results sections of research articles included different amounts of exceedingly complex patterns of pre-modification, a hybrid of novel appositive structures, and great reliance on hyphenated adjectives. Overall, we believe that these findings can be used to heighten the awareness of academic writers and instructors regarding the linguistic characteristics of academic writing and of the variations of how such phrasal features of compression are constructed in different academic subjects.

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Section: Ra and Studies On The Results Sections Of Rasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Artículosmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Research Articles and Phrasal Complexity Featuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Phrasal Discourse Style in Cross-Disciplinary Writing: A Comparison of Phrasal Complexity Features in the Results Sections of Research Articles

Parviz¹,

Jalilifar²,

Don³

2020

CLAC

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“…Así Kraljević et al (2016) muestran cómo va evolucionando el lenguaje de niños en el estadio de desarrollo tardío a propósito de la reformulación de oraciones relativas. Ansarifar et al (2018) comparan resúmenes escritos por estudiantes persas con nivel de maestría, escritores de nivel de doctorado y escritores expertos del campo de la lingüística aplicada, en términos de características de modicación de la frase. Concluyen que el grupo de maestría diere signicativamente de los escritores expertos en el uso de cuatro tipos de modicadores, mientras que el grupo de doctorado solo muestra el uso de frases preposicionales como sustantivos posmodicadores.…”

Section: Tendencias Investigativasunclassified

Complejidad Lingüística: Revisión Bibliográfica

Sierra

Lobelle

2020

SyP

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La complejidad lingüística es un tema de gran interés para los estudiosos del lenguaje, investigadores de inteligencia artificial, educadores y editores. Este artículo presenta el estado del arte sobre este tema. Se buscó la información en cinco bases de datos y se usó la metodología propuesta por Petticrew y Roberts (2008). Los resultados muestran cuatro hallazgos principales: 1) los estudios son básicamente de corte aplicado; 2) hay tres tendencias de investigación relacionadas con este tema: a) estudios que miden el desarrollo de la complejidad en distintas poblaciones, b) investigaciones que miden el efecto de la complejidad en los procesos de comprensión y producción de textos, c) trabajos sobre la dificultad de procesamiento de ciertas estructuras. 3) la complejidad lingüística se ha medido esencialmente con criterios sintácticos y léxicos. 4) Lo que hace que un texto sea más complejo que otro, se relaciona con factores como cantidad, familiaridad y género textual.

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“…Previous studies have broadly looked at phrasal complexity in learner writing (e.g. Ansarifar, Shahriari, & Pishghadam, 2018;Kreyer & Schaub, 2018;Martínez, 2018;Parkinson & Musgrave, 2014;Staples, Egbert, Biber, & Gray, 2016;Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015), but few have narrowed down their focus to a particular feature, such as relative clauses. As mentioned by Vyatkina, Hirschmann, & Golcher 1 Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finegan, E. (1999).…”

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confidence: 99%

An Examination of Relative Clauses in Argumentative Essays Written by EFL Learners

Shahriari

Shadloo

Ansarifar

2018

JLE

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Syntactic complexity has received a great deal of attention in the literature on second language writing. Relative clauses, which function as a kind of noun phrase post-modifier, are among those structures that are believed to increase the complexity of academic prose. This grammatical structure can pose difficulties for EFL writers even at higher levels of proficiency, and it is therefore important to determine the frequency and accuracy with which relative clauses are used by L2 learners; understanding learners’ strengths and weaknesses in using these structures can inform the process of their instruction in the writing classroom. This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of relative clauses in a number of argumentative essays written by native and nonnative speakers of English. To this end, 30 argumentative essays were randomly selected from the Persian sub-corpus of the ICLE and the essays were analyzed with respect to the relative clauses found in them. The results were then compared to a comparable corpus of essays by native speakers. Different dimensions regarding the structure of relative clauses were investigated. The type of relative clause (restrictive/non-restrictive), the relativizer (adverbial/pronoun), the gap (subject/non-subject), and head nouns (both animate and non-animate) in our two sets of data were manually identified and coded. The Findings revealed that Iranian EFL writers tend to use a greater number of relative clauses compared to their native-speaker counterparts.

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Phrasal complexity in academic writing: A comparison of abstracts written by graduate students and expert writers in applied linguistics

Cited by 109 publications

References 36 publications

Phrasal Discourse Style in Cross-Disciplinary Writing: A Comparison of Phrasal Complexity Features in the Results Sections of Research Articles

Phrasal Discourse Style in Cross-Disciplinary Writing: A Comparison of Phrasal Complexity Features in the Results Sections of Research Articles

Complejidad Lingüística: Revisión Bibliográfica

An Examination of Relative Clauses in Argumentative Essays Written by EFL Learners

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