EFL Academic Writing Development Beyond the University Essay Genre: Functional Syntactic Complexity in Scholarly Research Writing

Abstract

Effectively realizing meaning in the lexis and grammar of a foreign language is naturally challenging. The compounded challenges EFL learners experience in academic written communication result in a deficiency that has been studied extensively in the context of Morocco. Different aspects of this deficiency have been identified. Yet, we know little about whether the lack of writing genre proficiency contributes to this academic writing underdevelopment. The present study investigates functional syntactic complexity as a characteristic feature in complex meaning-making in the applied linguistics scholarly research writing genre. Towards this end, the deployment of syntactic complexity features in 120 Discussion sections in research articles written by Moroccan doctoral candidates was compared to the use of the same features in 120 Discussion sections in research articles authored by expert international researchers. Theoretically underpinned by the cognitive-functional outlook and guided by the corpus linguistics approach, this study was carried out using computational linguistics tools. The statistical analyses of the data indicate significant differences between the two groups regarding the use of syntactic complexity to realize rhetorical functions; namely, the degree of coordination, the degree of subordination, the degree of phrasal sophistication, nominal modification, apposition, prepositional phrases, and nominalization. These findings provide actionable insights with respect to functional grammar instruction and teaching grammar for and in the context of writing. Furthermore, the empirical evidence here signals the imperativeness of foregrounding the conceptualization of academic writing proficiency as genre-based, rather than the transfer of a uniform writing skill to different meaning-making situations. These insights thus afford deriving practical applications for academic writing development, scholarly research writing instruction, and syllabus and assessment framework design.