Investigating the effects of reducing linguistic complexity on EAL student comprehension in first-year undergraduate assessments

Academic writing across disciplines is often linguistically complex, characterized by abstract ideas densely packed into nominal groups (Biber & Gray, 2010; Halliday & Martin, 1993; McCabe & Gallagher, 2008), along with infrequent lexis and content requiring specific cultural knowledge. This linguistic complexity presents a significant comprehension challenge, contributing to an increase in the performance gap between English as an additional...