Examining Scientific Writing Styles from the Perspective of Linguistic Complexity

Publishing articles in high-impact English journals is difficult for scholars around the world, especially for non-native English-speaking scholars (NNESs), most of whom struggle with proficiency in English. In order to uncover the differences in English scientific writing between native English-speaking scholars (NESs) and NNESs, we collected a large-scale data set containing more than 150,000 full-text articles published in PLoS between 2006 and 2015. We divided these articles into three groups according to the ethnic backgrounds of the first and corresponding authors, obtained by Ethnea, and examined the scientific writing styles in English from a two-fold perspective of linguistic complexity: (1) syntactic complexity, including measurements of sentence length and sentence complexity; and (2) lexical complexity, including measurements of lexical diversity, lexical density, and lexical sophistication. The observations suggest marginal differences between groups in syntactical and lexical complexity.Comment: 6 figure

A preliminary study of cloze procedure as a tool for estimating English readability for Russian students

This preliminary study examines the relationships between each of six first language (L1) readability indexes and the cloze passage mean performances of Russian EFL students. The cloze passages were created by randomly selecting 50 text passages from an American public library and deleting every 12th word in each passage to create a 30-item cloze procedure. The participants were 5170 EFL students from 38 universities in the Russian Federation. Each student was randomly assigned to take one of the 30-item cloze passages. The L1 readability indexes calculated for each of the 50 passages were the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, Fry, Gunning, Fog, and modified Gunning-Fog indexes. The preliminary results indicate that the L1 readability indexes were moderately to highly correlated with each other, but only somewhat correlated with the mean performances of Russian university students on cloze versions of those same passages. These results are discussed in terms of why the L1 readability indexes are moderately to highly correlated with each other but only somewhat correlated to the Russian EFL means. The authors also explain what they are planning in terms of further linguistic analyses (e.g., of variables like average word length, percent of function words, number of syllables per sentence, number of words per paragraph, frequencies of words in the passages, and so forth) and statistical analyses (including at least factor analysis, multiple regression analyses, and structural equation modeling) of these data

A meta-analysis of second language cloze testing research

Numerous studies have accumulated over the last forty years in which second language testing researchers have examined various cloze test characteristics, including what cloze tests are measuring, under what conditions, and for what type of learners. In order to understand the accumulated knowledge of cloze procedures in second language testing research, the following research questions were posed: 1. What are the test and learner characteristics in the primary cloze test studies to date? 2. How does the deletion pattern affect the reliability of the cloze results? 3. How do various scoring methods (exact, acceptable, and clozentropy) affect the reliability of the cloze tests? 4. What is the strength of relationship between acceptable and exact scoring methods

Developing online extensive reading and listening materials

This paper aims to explain the process of creating extensive reading (ER) and extensive listening materials (EL) for learners of English. Four graded readers and four episodes of a podcast were produced in collaboration with other graduate students and faculty at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. Although a direct learner population is not specified, these materials were designed for second/foreign English language learners preparing for or entering their first years at an English medium university. The main goals of this paper are to: 1. Explain my materials development process 2. Explain the pitfalls and solutions that occur during the materials development process 3. Show what materials exist online that can be used for extensive reading and listenin

An EFL Readability Index

This surdy explores readability and its relationship to the cloze passage performance of EFL students. Fifty reading passages were randomly selected from an American public library and made into 30-item cloze passages by deleting every 12th word. Thc subjects were 2298 EFL students from 18 university level institutions in Japan. Each student was randomly selected to take one of the 30-item cloze passages. Any differences between the cloze passages were therefore assumed to be due to other than sampling difierences. The result was a set of 50 cloze passages the means of which sewed as the dependent variable: EFL Difficulty. Each passage was then analyzed for two sets of independent variables chosen to investigate how well they predict the EFL Difficulty: the first set was made up of various first language readability indices (including the Flesch, Flesch-Kincaid, Fry, Gunning, Fog, and modified Gunning-Fog indices); the second set was made up of quantifiable linguistic characteristics of the passages (e.g., the percent of function words number of syllabuses per sentence, number of words per paragraph, frequencies of words in the passages, and nany others). Correlational, factor and multiple-regression analyses indicated that the first language readability indices were only weakly related to EFL Difficulty (23 to 30 percent). However, the analysis of linguistic characteristics indicated clear groupings among the variables. In addition, four of the linguistic characteristics (number of syllables per sentence, the average frequency of lexical items elsewhere in the passage, percent of words with seven or more letters, and percent of function words) when combined were more highly related to EFL Difficulty (55 percent). These results are discussed in terms of their implications for the development of an EFL readability index

Investigating Effects of Teacher’s Using Authentic Texts on Cognitive Reading Engagement of Vietnamese EFL Students

The study examines the effects of teacher’s using authentic texts on EFL students’ cognitive reading engagement related to four variables including (i) reading comprehension, (ii) oral response to reading, (iii) reaction paragraph, and (iv) students’ perceptions of learning to read. Participants included 52 Vietnamese undergraduate students of EFL pre-intermediate level. The data of the study were collected through reading tests for the first three variables and a 32- item questionnaire for the fourth variable. Results revealed that students in the experimental condition achieved significantly better understanding of reading comprehension after the intervention course. In terms of reflection after reading and creating a reaction paragraph, the holistic quality of oral response and the reaction paragraph was significantly improved for both groups from a peer rating. However, students in the experimental group showed a more dramatic increase. Moreover, the findings of the questionnaire showed that students in the intervention course achieved a more positive perception of their learning to read

Evaluating Machine Translation: the Cloze Procedure Revisited

Summary This paper describes the use of the "cloze procedure" to make a comparative evaluation of some currently available MT systems. This technique, which involves masking some words in a text, and then asking subjects to guess the missing words, was used in the 1960s and 1970s as an evaluation method, but no more recent use has been reported, even though the methodology is simple to implement and provides an objective result. We report here two experiments in which we tested three MT systems against a human translation, with texts from three different genres, to see whether the procedure can be used to rank MT systems against each other. The paper discusses some details of the procedure which provide important variables to the test, notably what percentage of words are masked, and whether the scoring procedure should be right-wrong, or should differentiate between different degrees of wrong answer (crediting close synonyms and other plausible near-misses). We discuss other aspects of the procedure which may affect the test's usability. Especially of interest is the fact that there seems to be a lower quality threshold below which the procedure is less discriminatory: the translation is so bad that the subjects cannot make reasonable guesses at all. All trademarks are hereby acknowledged

Examining the Part-of-speech Features in Assessing the Readability of Vietnamese Texts

The readability of the text plays a very important role in selecting appropriate materials for the level of the reader. Text readability in Vietnamese language has received a lot of attention in recent years, however, studies have mainly been limited to simple statistics at the level of a sentence length, word length, etc. In this article, we investigate the role of word-level grammatical characteristics in assessing the difficulty of texts in Vietnamese textbooks. We have used machine learning models (for instance, Decision Tree, K-nearest neighbor, Support Vector Machines, etc.) to evaluate the accuracy of classifying texts according to readability, using grammatical features in word level along with other statistical characteristics. Empirical results show that the presence of POS-level characteristics increases the accuracy of the classification by 2-4%