The Linguistic Development of Students of English as a Second Language in Two Written Genres

This study examined narrative and argumentative essays written over the course of a 4-month semester by 37 students of English as a second language (ESL). The essays were analyzed for development over time and for genre differences. The goal of the study was to conceptually replicate previous studies on genre differences (e.g., Lu, 2011) and on short-term linguistic development in the areas of syntactic complexity, accuracy, lexical complexity,...