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This linguistic study investigates the lexico-grammatical features of Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners’ argumentative essays. The study utilizes corpus linguistic methods and natural language processing tools to analyze 1460 writing samples from an online learner corpus. Variations in linguistic complexity and sophistication of clause, phrase, and syntactic sophistication across different proficiency levels were examined using AntConc, Multidimensional Analysis Tagger, and TAASSC. The results indicate significant variances in lexico-grammatical complexity and sophistication features between low and high proficiency levels. The study revealed that proficiency levels of EFL learners had varying effects on clausal complexity, phrasal complexity, and syntactic sophistication. The study also identifies limitations in the natural language processing tool used for extracting target indices in argumentative essays. Overall, these findings have implications for EFL teaching, learning, and assessment, and for improving NLP tools.
Li et al. (Sun,) studied this question.