Korean EFL Learners’ Language Development across Proficiency Levels in Written Productions

Abstract

The present study was designed to investigate Korean EFL college learners’ language development across writing proficiency levels in their written productions. For the evaluation of their language development, 18 subsets of the syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) were used. 86 university students participated in the study and wrote narrative essays about an assigned topic by using the Criterion®. The writing samples were scored by e-rater® and divided into three different proficiency levels to compare language development among groups. Then their essays were analyzed by using L2 Syntactical Complexity Analyzer. The findings reveal significant differences in 15 out of 18 measures of CAF and language learners’ linguistic developmental patterns across their writing proficiency levels. The results indicate that there are distinctive features regarding CAF among the three groups. With respect to fluency and accuracy, levels 1 and 2 showed a similar language developmental pattern, and level 3 was much higher than those groups. In terms of syntactic complexity, levels 2 and 3 presented a similar developmental pattern, and level 1 was much lower than those groups in general. This study shows the predictive potential of CAF across writing proficiency levels of language learners.