ABSTRACT

Mastering analytical writing involves the proficient use of varied later-acquired grammatical, lexical and discourse forms and functions. Developmental studies have identified specific linguistic features as diagnostic of increasing proficiency. This study examines how these features change throughout educational levels and before and after the implementation of a set of classroom activities aimed at homogenizing participants’ pedagogical input while raising their awareness of analytical texts’ main functions. Two hundred and twelve Spanish speakers from primary, secondary and university levels participate in the study, each producing two analytical texts. The corpus consists of 424 texts produced on the same topic. Results indicate that not all the features pertaining to the same domain show identical changes across educational levels or are identically sensitive to pedagogical work. Productivity measures increase with educational level and after pedagogical work, except for university students. Most lexical, syntactic and discourse-level measures improve with educational level, though their sensitivity to pedagogical work is not straightforward. Findings suggest the need to evaluate writing quality at a high level of granularity.

摘要

精通分析写作，需要熟练使用各种后来习得的语法，词汇和话语形式和功能。发展研究已经确定了特定的语言特征，可以诊断出熟练程度的提高。这项研究探讨了这些特征在整个教育水平以及在实施一系列课堂活动之前和之后的变化，这些活动旨在使参与者的教学投入同质化，同时提高他们对分析文本主要功能的认识。来自小学，中学和大学的112位讲西班牙语的人参加了这项研究，每人都发表了两篇分析性文章。语料库由针对同一主题产生的424篇文章组成。结果表明，并非同一领域的所有功能在整个教育水平上都表现出相同的变化或对教学工作同样敏感。生产率的提高随着教育程度的提高和教学工作的增加而增加，大学生除外。大多数词汇，句法和语篇级别的衡量标准随着教育水平的提高而提高，尽管它们对教学工作的敏感性并不直接。研究结果表明需要以较高的粒度评估写作质量。