Nasseri, Maryam 
ORCID: 0000-0003-4421-2518
(2021).
Statistical modelling of lexical and syntactic complexity of postgraduate academic writing: a genre and corpus-based study of EFL,ESL, and English L1 M.A. dissertations.
University of Birmingham.
Ph.D.
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Nasseri2021PhD.pdf
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Abstract
This research is an interdisciplinary study that adopts the principles of corpus linguistics and the methods of quantitative linguistics and statistical modelling to analyse the rhetorical sections of MA dissertations written by EFL, ESL, and English L1 postgraduate students. A discipline-specific corpus was analysed for 22 lexical and 11 syntactic complexity measures using three natural language processing tools [LCA-AW, TAALED, Coh Metrix] to find differences of academic texts by English L1 vs. L2 and to investigate the relationship between these linguistic indices. Structural factor analyses as well as the two statistical modelling methods of linear mixed-effects modelling and the supervised machine learning predictive classification modelling were then employed to verify the existing classification of the complexity indices, to explore their further dimensions, to investigate the effects of English language background and rhetorical sections on the production of lexically and syntactically complex texts, and finally to predict models that can best classify the group membership and the membership to the rhetorical sections based on the values of these measures. This investigation resulted in more than 20 specific findings with important implications for academic writing assessment of English L1 vs. L2, for academic writing research on rhetorical sections of English academic texts, for academic writing instruction especially materials development and syllabus designs in the EFL contexts, and academic immersion programmes, for the measure-testing and selection processes, and for methodological aspects of statistical modelling in corpus-based academic studies.
| Type of Work: | Thesis (Doctorates > Ph.D.) | |||||||||
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| Award Type: | Doctorates > Ph.D. | |||||||||
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| Licence: | All rights reserved | |||||||||
| College/Faculty: | Colleges (2008 onwards) > College of Arts & Law | |||||||||
| School or Department: | Department of English Language and Linguistics, School of English, Drama and American and Canadian Studies | |||||||||
| Funders: | None/not applicable | |||||||||
| Other Funders: | self-funded | |||||||||
| Subjects: | A General Works > AZ History of Scholarship The Humanities H Social Sciences > HA Statistics P Language and Literature > PE English |
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| URI: | http://etheses.bham.ac.uk/id/eprint/11190 |
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