Ahmadi، Farshid

Mapping Iranian Advanced English Learners’ Writing onto their B.A. Course Books: A Coh-Metrix based Analysis of Linguistic Features Analysis of Linguistic Features

AbstractBased on the assumption that B A text books may exert effects on the students writing thisstudy was conducted to investigate whether there was any relationship between the advancedEFL students writing and their B A course books or not To this end a sample of 35 firstyear M A TEFL students as advanced students and a collection of B A course books wereselected To set the criteria for comparison we used a number of automated text easabilityindices that could measure difficulty level of both BA textbooks and argumentative essaysof about 500 words written within a time limit of at most 30 minutes by students at thebeginning middle and the end of an advanced writing course The essays and B A coursebooks were analyzed for syntactic complexity word information lexical diversity referential cohesion and connectives using Coh Metrix Text Easability Assessor Afteranalyzing the essays by Coh Metrix the results were subjected to statistical analysis Generally no meaningful differences were found in the mean scores of the two sets of textsand thus the target question was positively answered That is there was a direct relationshipbetween the advanced students texts and their B A course books although there were somedifferences in some indices which were not statistically significant The results of the studycan be used for effective teaching of foreign language writing helping students to adjusttheir writing strategies to accomplish cohesion and coherence Keywords Writing Coh Metrix Linguistic features Language sophistication Cohesion vi