PLIN SEMINAR - 17 APRIL
ilc | Louvain-la-Neuve, Mons
Bethany Gray will be at LLN the week of April 14.
In addition to her presentation at PLINday2025 on Friday, April 18, she will also talk about her recent research on grammatical complexity in L1/L2 in a seminar on Thursday, April 17, from 10:45 to 11:45 a.m. in C228.
Grammatical Complexity in L1 and L2 University Student Writing: Telling a Story beyond Frequency Differences through Innovative Data Analyses
Bethany Gray (Iowa State University)
A great deal of research on the development of grammatical complexity in L1 and L2 university student writing has focused on the frequency of complexity features, often relying on null hypothesis testing to identify significant differences between writers at different proficiency levels, over time, and/or between L1 and L2 writers. While findings about frequency are fairly robust, it is only through systematic descriptive analysis that we can gain more nuanced and comprehensive knowledge to evaluate hypotheses related to (and explanations of) such quantitative trends. In this presentation, I illustrate how innovative, non-inferential approaches to both quantitative and qualitative data analysis can provide important insights into the development of grammatical complexity. The presentation draws on the analyses reported in Staples, Gray, Biber, & Egbert (2023) and Gray, Staples, & Bordbarjavidi (2024), which take a Register-Functional approach (Biber et al., 2022) to investigate the development of grammatical complexity in L1 and L2 university student writing using the BAWE corpus (Nesi et al., 2004-2007). These analyses demonstrate a novel approach to nuanced quantitative descriptions to describe the trajectory of development for L1 and L2 writers, paired with (a) function- and meaning-based analyses and (b) an analysis of the diversity of use of grammatical complexity features.