ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 reviews previous frameworks for analyzing second language (L2) learners’ written texts in order to describe L2 learners’ underlying linguistic knowledge and to gain insights into L2 learners’ writing performance and how writing performance varies across writing tasks, contexts, and individuals. Most of these frameworks focus on analyzing the grammatical aspects (i.e., linguistic complexity, accuracy, and fluency, or CAF) and, to a lesser extent, discourse aspects of L2 learners’ written texts. Other aspects of written communication, such as sociolinguistic choices, content, and source use, are not usually examined. To redress this shortcoming, we propose a new framework for analyzing L2 learners’ written texts that builds upon previous theory and research on Communicative Language Competence. The framework includes four levels of abstraction that define the constructs to be measured and how to measure them; these four levels range from the most abstract to the most concrete and include: competencies, constructs, measures, and indices. Six competencies are included in the framework: grammatical, discourse, sociolinguistic, strategic, content, and source use. Each competence (e.g., discourse) subsumes one or more constructs (e.g., cohesion); each construct subsumes one or more measures (e.g., local cohesion); and each measure is operationalized with one or more indices (e.g., incidence of connectives). The chapter also discusses three methods for analyzing L2 learners’ texts, human rating, manual coding, and computer analysis, and argues for combining these three methods in order to gain a better understanding of differences and changes in L2 learners’ texts.
