Register variation in L1 and L2 student writing

While there have been many studies describing L2 academic writing, most of these studies have used corpora of first year or assessment writing (Crosthwaite 2016Crosthwaite, P. (2016). A longitudinal multidimensional analysis of EAP writing: Determining EAP course effectiveness. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 221, 166–178. ; Weigle & Friginal 2014). The present study seeks to describe linguistic variation in L2 writing for content classes and to compare these linguistic patterns to those found in L1 writing. A multi-dimensional (MD) analysis was conducted in two corpora, BAWE and BrAWE, extracting five dimensions. The L2 corpus contained 379 texts written by Brazilian students doing part of their undergrad in the UK and the L1 corpus contained 395 texts from BAWE. The results of this study indicate that L1 and L2 writers use similar linguistic resources to convey the purpose of university registers, with the exception of case studies, designs, exercises and research reports. This linguistic variation between L1 and L2 writers might be explained by students’ interpretation of these registers’ communicative purposes.