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ABSTRACT This study investigated how linguistic complexity indicators predicted writing performance in German as a foreign language (L2 German), focusing on potential similarities and differences across argumentative and expository genres. By analyzing 4,177 essays written by second‐year German majors with intermediate proficiency in China, we conducted multiple regression analyses to explore the predictive effect. Thirteen linguistic complexity indicators explained approximately 51% of the score variance in argumentative essays, and eight indicators accounted for approximately 39% of the variance in expository essays. Several similarities were identified between the two genres, with lexical diversity being the strongest predictor of writing scores and word familiarity being more influential than word frequency. Meanwhile, some differences were also identified, with lexical density negatively affecting argumentative writing scores while verb diversity positively influenced expository writing scores. Furthermore, the effect of syntactic complexity was genre‐specific, with clausal complexity being a positive predictor of argumentative essay scores, whereas prepositional phrases (PP) were a significant factor for expository essay scores. Our findings broaden L2 writing research by underscoring the unique linguistic characteristics of German writing and the genre‐specific and cross‐genre commonalities of linguistic indices in affecting writing performance.
Li et al. (Tue,) studied this question.
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