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Linguistic complexity serves as an important measure of second language (L2) writing development. Complexity indices, however, rarely feature in the studies of learner languages other than English. Additionally, L2 writing studies have been criticized for the lack of consistency in defining proficiency. The current study addresses these gaps by exploring writing development in a less commonly studied language (i.e., Russian) while paying attention to the operationalization of proficiency. We analyzed lexical and syntactic complexity indices in a corpus of essays written by learners at different levels at the beginning and the end of an instructional program. Our analyses demonstrate that 9 complexity indices (i.e., mean word length, type--token ratio, percentage of high-frequency words, mean sentence length, clauses per sentence, syntactic depth, proportion of subordinate clauses, and proportion of relative clauses) changed significantly over the course of the program; the same 9 indices showed significant correlation with the initial curricular placement, and all--with the exception of clauses per sentence--modestly or highly correlated with the final rating on the proficiency test. The findings confirm the usefulness of complexity measures in tracking writing development in L2 Russian.

The Zone of Proximal Development has been one of the most misunderstood features of Sociocultural Theory. It has been inappropriately equated with Krashens i+1 and with the concept of'scaffolding. Based on an empirical study where learners seemed to require the same degree of explicit mediation at two different points in time, Erlam, etal. (2013) have questioned Aljaafreh and Lantolf s (1994) regulatory scale and have instead supported a one-size-fits-all use of explicit mediation. This article provides a theoretical and empirical counter argument to Erlam, et al.'s (2013) proposal. Given Vygotskys (1987) claim that development is revolutionary on theoretical grounds alone, we would not expect that because at time 1 a learner required explicit mediation at time 2 that same learner would require less explicit (or more implicit) mediation to recognize and correct use of an inappropriate L2 feature. We also present empirical evidence from a close analysis of Aljaafreh's (1992) dissertation that supplements the data considered in Lantolf and Aljaafreh (1995), which showed that even when mediation regresses from more implicit to more explicit levels on the regulatory scale, it does not regress to the beginning of the process where mediation is maximally explicit. Progress, overall, is forward, even if it requires some backtracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]