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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Lang. Sci.
Sec. Psycholinguistics
Volume 3 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.1480422
This article is part of the Research Topic Interacting factors in the development of discourse practices from childhood to adulthood View all 4 articles

The Influence of Students' Linguistic Condition, School Level, and Pedagogical Input on Analytical Essay Features

Provisionally accepted
Melina Aparici Melina Aparici 1*Elisa Rosado Elisa Rosado 2Hugo Vilar Hugo Vilar 3Rocío Cuberos Rocío Cuberos 4Liliana Tolchinsky Liliana Tolchinsky 2
  • 1 Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
  • 2 University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
  • 3 International University of La Rioja, Logroño, La Rioja, Spain
  • 4 Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Madrid, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Analytical essays are a fundamental discourse practice within educational settings. These essays are topic-oriented texts that aim to inform readers about a specific matter while persuading them of the writer's perspective. This study investigates how students' linguistic condition (monolingual vs. bilingual) affects their ability to meet the social and discursive expectations of analytical essays. This is examined both over a broad developmental span, from elementary to higher education, and microdevelopmentally, through a sequence of genre-oriented classroom activities.A corpus of 1,179 essays, written by Spanish monolingual and Catalan/Spanish bilingual students across elementary, secondary, and university levels, was analyzed. Participants were tasked with producing texts on both same and different topics The analysis focused on lexical, syntacticdiscursive and structural features identified as indicators of writing proficiency in the Developing Analytical Writing (DAW) model developed in previous studies. Pedagogical input was controlled by the researchers, and an external evaluation of text quality was performed by teachers from the different school levels.Results indicate that students' linguistic condition influenced most, but not all, the linguistic and structural indicators of writing proficiency but always in interaction with age/school level and pedagogical input. Improvements were observed across school levels and with pedagogical input.Additionally, teachers varied in their appreciation of different facets of writing performance as a function of the participants' age/school level and pedagogical input. However, the linguistic condition of students alone did not significantly impact external evaluations of text quality. Our findings reveal a complex interplay between factors such as writers' linguistic condition, their age/school level, and pedagogical input, which jointly shape the quality of analytical essays.

    Keywords: Analytical writing, developmental changes, Catalan/Spanish bilinguals, Spanish monolingual, Text production, elementary to university level, text features

    Received: 14 Aug 2024; Accepted: 11 Nov 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Aparici, Rosado, Vilar, Cuberos and Tolchinsky. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Melina Aparici, Autonomous University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.