Understanding first-year L2 writing: A lexico-grammatical analysis across L1s, genres, and language ratings

Despite a large number of studies on L2 writing at the university level, few have systematically examined the writing produced by these students within the context of their writing classes (Leki et al., 2008, Silva, 1993). This paper investigates the language used in first-year writing across three L1s (English, Arabic, and Chinese) and two genres (Argumentative and Rhetorical Analysis) as well as its relationship to language ratings. We use a...