UNDERSTANDING DEVELOPMENT AND PROFICIENCY IN WRITING – BOOK REVIEW

Hatice Altun

Abstract


The original and thought-provoking book “Understanding Development and Proficiency in Writing” was written by Philip Durrant, Mark Brenchley, and Lee McCallum and published in 2021 by Cambridge University Press. It comprises seven major chapters, four of which focus on key areas of language proficiency: syntax, vocabulary, formulaic language, and cohesion. The book focuses on the continual debate of evaluating and interpreting development in L1 and L2 writing and offers evidence-based and objective perspectives to explore development. It reviews almost 250 quantitative corpus linguistics (QCL) based studies spanning over 70 years, thanks to its empirical approach. The historical and theoretical overview of QCL research on written language suggests a powerful guide map to understand what is already known (and not known) about written language development. It inspires us about what to do next to evaluate and assess first and second-language writing from a more robust perspective.

 

Article visualizations:

Hit counter


Keywords


corpus linguistics; second language writing, assessment of writing development

Full Text:

PDF

References


Durrant, P., & Brenchley, M. (in press). The Development of Academic Collocations in Children’s Writing. In P. Szudarski & S. Barclay (Eds.), Vocabulary Theory, Patterning and Teaching. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.

Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. (2011). Computational Analyses of Multilevel Discourse Comprehension. Topics in Cognitive Science, 3, 371–398.

Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. Harlow: Longman.

Hunt, K. W. (1965). Grammatical Structures Written at Three Grade Levels: NCTE Research Report No. 3. Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English.

Read, J. (2000). Assessing Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.




DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejfl.v7i1.4717

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Copyright © 2015 - 2023. European Journal of Foreign Language Teaching (ISSN 2537-1754) is a registered trademark of Open Access Publishing Group. All rights reserved.

This journal is a serial publication uniquely identified by an International Standard Serial Number (ISSN) serial number certificate issued by Romanian National Library (Biblioteca Nationala a Romaniei). All the research works are uniquely identified by a CrossRef DOI digital object identifier supplied by indexing and repository platforms.

All the research works published on this journal are meeting the Open Access Publishing requirements and can be freely accessed, shared, modified, distributed and used in educational, commercial and non-commercial purposes under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).