L2 Writing Development and Tertiary Grade Level

Second language writing assessment is of great significance for second language researchers, teachers and learners. Studies of writing of different grade levels will provide detailed information about textual features in each grade and student’s writing development. In this study, a corpus of 124 second language writing texts (from freshmen to senior students) was used to find out the textual feature differences in terms of China’s English major students of the four grade levels based on the computational tool Coh-Metrix2.1. Results show that significant differences were found across the four tertiary grade levels in terms of a multiple indices such as basic textual features, cohesion, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, word frequency, readability as well as topic sentence-hood. However, not all linear patterns were shown in these indices across the four grade levels, some linear, some non-linear, and the period from the second year to the third year can be treated as a very important turning point that deserves our attention.