Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians face centers on articulating their ideas in English in the way that meets the norms and expectations of their international discourse community. That is, their writing is characterized as wordy, cumbersome, too academese, and syntactically complex. These issues need to be addressed in the early stages of developing writing skills. In this study, we address discourse differences between the scientific writing of Russian engineering students and that of international experts. Using the computational linguistics tools Coh-Metrix and Gramulator, we compare a corpus of students’ manuscripts with a similar corpus of experts’ published papers. We focused on six conceptual categories: readability, writing quality, cohesion, syntax, word choice, and genre purity. The overall results suggest that student writing differs significantly for multiple characteristics of text and discourse. A discriminant analysis provided a model that successfully predicts group membership and helps identify the most important issues in Russian student writing. Measures such as noun phrase density, genre purity, word age of acquisition, and variance in sentence length were found to be significant positive predictors of Russian student writing, whereas lexical diversity, adversative/contrastive connectives, adverbial phrase density, and word concreteness were significant positive predictors of expert writing. Our analysis allowed us to provide guidance for instructors, materials designers, as well as for technological assessment tools.

几乎所有研究人员都了解在同行评审的英文期刊上发表他们的研究的要求。俄罗斯科学作家也理解这种必要性。然而，有证据表明，与类似的非英语母语人士相比，这些特定的研究人员表现不佳。俄罗斯人面临的巨大挑战集中在以符合其国际话语社区的规范和期望的方式用英语表达他们的想法。也就是说，他们的写作特点是冗长、繁琐、过于学院化和语法复杂。这些问题需要在发展写作技巧的早期阶段得到解决。在这项研究中，我们解决了俄罗斯工程专业学生的科学写作与国际专家的科学写作之间的话语差异。使用计算语言学工具 Coh-Metrix 和 Gramulator，我们将学生手稿的语料库与类似的专家发表的论文语料库进行比较。我们专注于六个概念类别：可读性、写作质量、衔接、句法、单词选择和流派纯度。总体结果表明，学生的写作在文本和话语的多个特征上存在显着差异。判别分析提供了一个模型，该模型成功地预测了团体成员并帮助确定了俄罗斯学生写作中最重要的问题。名词短语密度、体裁纯度、单词习得年龄和句子长度变化等指标被认为是俄语学生写作的显着正向预测因素，而词汇多样性、反格/对比连接词、副词短语密度、和单词具体性是专家写作的显着积极预测因素。我们的分析使我们能够为教师、材料设计师以及技术评估工具提供指导。