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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Differences In Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of El1 And Ell Civil Engineering Students, Santiago Gustin
Differences In Syntactic Complexity In The Writing Of El1 And Ell Civil Engineering Students, Santiago Gustin
Dissertations and Theses
Traditional studies in syntactic complexity consider increased clausal complexity to be characteristic of development, proficiency and growth in written language production. However, this stereotypical view ignores two important facts. First, complexity differs by register (i.e. daily speech versus formal writing). Second, as the proficiency of writers increases, their complexity in formal writing changes from clausal complexity to phrasal complexity (i.e. lower-proficiency writers have more subordinate clauses whereas higher-proficiency writers tend to have more noun phrases). Therefore, in this study, I argue for the need to consider not just clausal complexity but also phrasal complexity measures when assessing development and performance …
Relationship Between Empathy And Language Proficiency In Adult Language Learners, Mika Sakai
Relationship Between Empathy And Language Proficiency In Adult Language Learners, Mika Sakai
Dissertations and Theses
This study reviews concepts and the mechanism of empathy, and the relationship between empathy and language proficiency, focusing on the aspect of cognitive empathy. It also discusses whether empathy levels could be developed by learning language to a highly proficient level. I compared the empathy levels between high and low proficiency second-language learners to determine if there was correlation between empathy and other factors such as gender, studying abroad, education background, and usage of a second language. I found that there was no relationship between empathy level and language proficiency level; however, there was one between empathy and gender. For …