ABSTRACT

One of the missions of language education internationally is to enable students to use language in a context-appropriate manner. Against this backdrop, students’ ability to linguistically encode formality emerges as an important issue. Using extracts of writing produced by 16-year-old students in 2004 and 2014, this study sought to investigate whether the level of formality in students’ writing changed over time. The 858 extracts of writing sampled were composed as part of a high-stakes examination in English Language. The linguistic analysis carried out focused on a number of features serving either as discriminators between spoken and written discourse (e.g. lexical diversity, lexical sophistication), or as markers of informal electronic communication (e.g. abbreviations, omitted stops, non-capitalised sentences). A statistical comparison of the prevalence of these features in the 2004 and 2014 corpora indicated that students’ writing underwent informalisation. This trend was found to be stronger among lower attaining students.

摘要

国际上语言教育的任务之一是使学生能够以适合上下文的方式使用语言。在这种背景下，学生对语言形式进行编码的能力成为一个重要问题。本研究使用16岁的学生在2004年和2014年撰写的摘录，试图调查学生写作形式的水平是否随时间而改变。抽取的858篇写作摘录构成了英语高水平考试的一部分。进行的语言分析着眼于许多功能，这些功能既可以区分口语和书面话语（例如，词汇多样性，词汇复杂性），又可以充当非正式电子交流的标记（例如，缩写词，省略的中止句，不大写的句子）。对2004年和2014年语料库中这些功能的普遍性进行的统计比较表明，学生的写作经历了非正式化。在低学历的学生中发现这种趋势更为明显。