Article published in:
Register in L1 and L2 Language Development
Edited by Bethany Gray and Jesse Egbert
[Register Studies 3:2] 2021
► pp. 247–278

L2 Theme development in Discursive and Experimental undergraduate student writing

| South China Normal University
| Coventry University

To complement earlier studies of writing development in the BAWE corpus of successful student writing (Nesi & Gardner 2012; Staples et al. 2016), we examine the Systemic Functional Linguistics notion of Theme as used by L2 writers across first- and third-year and in two distinctive discourse types: persuasive/argumentative Discursive writing of assignments in the soft disciplines and Experimental report writing of assignments in the hard sciences. Theme analysis reveals more substantial differences across the two discourse types than between first- and third-year L2 undergraduate writing. Textual Themes are consistently more frequent than interpersonal Themes, and some variance is found within subcategories of each. Significant differences in lexical density occur across third-year discourse types and between first- and third-year Experimental writing where a predominance of N+N topical Themes is also found. These findings are important as previous research has tended to focus on L1 Discursive writing.

Keywords: Theme, second language writing development, academic writing across disciplines, BAWE corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theme in academic writing
    • 2.1Studies of Theme in L2 writing
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2The L2Dev corpus
    • 3.3General linguistic characteristics of the L2Dev corpus
    • 3.4Theme analysis
  • 4.L2 writing development: Findings
    • 4.1L2 writing development and Theme
    • 4.2Writing development and textual Theme
    • 4.3L2 writing development and interpersonal Themes
    • 4.4L2 writing development and ideational (topical) Themes
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 30 November 2021
https://doi.org/10.1075/rs.20018.che
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