View in EDS

Determining the L2 academic writing development stage: a corpus-based research on doctoral dissertations.

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Title: Determining the L2 academic writing development stage: a corpus-based research on doctoral dissertations.
Authors: Ahmad, Muhammad1,2 (AUTHOR) ahmad453@yandex.com, Mahmood, Muhammad Asim1,2 (AUTHOR) masimrai@gmail.com, Siddique, Ali Raza1,2 (AUTHOR) aalimalik381@gmail.com
Source: IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching. Mar2025, Vol. 63 Issue 1, p413-431. 19p.
Subject Terms: *Language acquisition, *Academic discourse, *English as a foreign language, *Nouns, *Academic dissertations
Abstract: This corpus-based research investigates features representing different stages of development in Pakistani academic writing (AW) to determine the stage of Pakistani AW in physical and social sciences. Corpus for this research comprises texts from 80 doctoral dissertations and is analyzed through AntConc after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and TagAnt. Results show Pakistani AW in both disciplines frequently comprising nouns as pre-modifiers that represent Stage-3. These are lower level features used by the writers developing towards higher levels. Therefore, Pakistani advanced level AW in physical and social sciences is positioned at Stage-3. This suggests that Pakistani writers in these disciplines are operating below the expected developmental level specifically Stage-5. These results are found to oppose the general hypothesis i.e. L2 (English as a second language) academic writers frequently use phrasal features at the advanced level. Consequently, Pakistani AW is concluded to be below the required level of language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
Copyright of IRAL: International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching is the property of De Gruyter and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
Database: Education Research Complete
Description
Abstract:This corpus-based research investigates features representing different stages of development in Pakistani academic writing (AW) to determine the stage of Pakistani AW in physical and social sciences. Corpus for this research comprises texts from 80 doctoral dissertations and is analyzed through AntConc after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and TagAnt. Results show Pakistani AW in both disciplines frequently comprising nouns as pre-modifiers that represent Stage-3. These are lower level features used by the writers developing towards higher levels. Therefore, Pakistani advanced level AW in physical and social sciences is positioned at Stage-3. This suggests that Pakistani writers in these disciplines are operating below the expected developmental level specifically Stage-5. These results are found to oppose the general hypothesis i.e. L2 (English as a second language) academic writers frequently use phrasal features at the advanced level. Consequently, Pakistani AW is concluded to be below the required level of language development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
ISSN:0019042X
DOI:10.1515/iral-2023-0028