Search

Whether respondents pay adequate attention to a questionnaire has long been of concern to survey researchers. In this study, we measure respondents' attention with an instruction manipulation check. We investigate which respondents read question texts of experimentally varied lengths and which become inattentive in a probability-based online panel of the German population. We find that respondent attention is closely linked to text length. Individual response speed is strongly correlated with respondent attention, but a fixed cutoff time is unsuitable as a standalone attention indicator. Differing levels of attention are also associated with respondents' age, gender, education, panel experience, and the device used to complete the survey. Removal of inattentive respondents is thus likely to result in a biased remaining sample. Instead, questions should be curtailed to encourage respondents of different backgrounds and abilities to read them attentively and provide optimized answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English textbooks are the most pivotal learning materials in the EFL context. However, in Vietnam, English textbooks for general education are randomized by schools, which arouses a problem of whether they are equivalent for students to gain the same proficiency. This study attempts to report the differences in lexical demands and features, including length, sophistication, and diversity, of these textbooks. To this end, the researchers compiled a corpus of 54,566 tokens extracted from their listening transcripts. Results profiled by AntwordProfiler showed that 1,000, 2,000 to 3,000, and 3,000 to 4,000 word families in the BNC/COCA wordlist plus four supplementary lists of proper nouns (PNs), marginal words (MWs), transparent compounds (TCs), and acronyms were necessary to comprehend 85%, 95%, and 98% of listening in all the textbooks, correspondingly. Moreover, the results of pairwise comparisons run by Jamovi indicated significant differences in text length and lexical diversity between the textbooks but not in sophistication. In short, these grade-10 textbooks could support students in learning English vocabulary although they impede students from using them randomly. Hence, the study heightens the roles of teachers in the classroom and paves the way for researchers who are fond of vocabulary and English textbooks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but the problem remains. This methodological review provides a critical analysis not only of the most commonly used indices in language learning studies, but also of the length problem itself, as well as of the methodology for evaluating the proposed solutions. Analysis of three data sets of texts produced by English language learners revealed that indices that reduce all texts to the same length using a probabilistic or an algorithmic approach solve the length‐dependency problem; however, all these indices failed to address the second problem, which is their sensitivity to the parameter that determines the length to which the texts are reduced. The paper concludes with recommendations for optimizing lexical diversity analysis. A one‐page Accessible Summary of this article in nontechnical language is freely available in the Supporting Information online and at https://oasis‐database.org [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transcription is an important component of the writing process that affects the quality of children's compositions. However, little is known about how transcription mode influences productivity or spelling accuracy, two word-level markers of compositional quality, among children learning to write in an additional language. To address this issue, we compared the effects of handwriting and keyboarding on text length and spelling in the compositions of L2 French learners. Grade 2 to 4 students (n = 48) in French Immersion were given two writing prompts and asked to produce one text on paper and one using a keyboard. The prompts were counterbalanced across the two writing conditions. The total number of words, total number of words spelled correctly, and proportion of correctly spelled words were calculated. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed an advantage in both the average number of correctly spelled words and the proportion of correctly spelled words in the students' compositions favouring the keyboarding condition. Conversely, the total number of words across conditions was not significantly different. Our findings suggest that keyboarding may offer an advantage over handwriting with respect to spelling accuracy in the context of L2 composition in the elementary years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Transcription is an important component of the writing process that affects the quality of children’s compositions. However, little is known about how transcription mode influences productivity or spelling accuracy, two word-level markers of compositional quality, among children learning to write in an additional language. To address this issue, we compared the effects of handwriting and keyboarding on text length and spelling in the compositions of L2 French learners. Grade 2 to 4 students (n = 48) in French Immersion were given two writing prompts and asked to produce one text on paper and one using a keyboard. The prompts were counterbalanced across the two writing conditions. The total number of words, total number of words spelled correctly, and proportion of correctly spelled words were calculated. A series of repeated measures ANOVAs revealed an advantage in both the average number of correctly spelled words and the proportion of correctly spelled words in the students’ compositions favouring the keyboarding condition. Conversely, the total number of words across conditions was not significantly different. Our findings suggest that keyboarding may offer an advantage over handwriting with respect to spelling accuracy in the context of L2 composition in the elementary years.

This study explores the relation between writing quality and contextualization and elaboration moves, two kinds of textual expansion devices crucial for building common ground between writers and readers. We ask whether elaboration and contextualization features differentially predict writing quality and whether their quality contributions differ between genres. We also ask to what extent elaboration and contextualization are tied to individual writers, and can be explained by writer characteristics. To examine these issues, we annotated descriptive and argumentative texts of Dutch adolescents. Text quality was rated holistically, using benchmark scales. As regards elaboration, depth affects quality more than breadth does. It also contributes across genres, whereas breadth only contributes in argumentations. Depth shows a large individual consistency across tasks, which is substantially related to students' school type, grade and gender. Breadth shows weaker links to individual writers and their characteristics. With regard to contextualization, opening and closing moves play a modest role in text quality. Initial support moves contribute to quality across tasks; concluding moves contribute more in argumentations. Concluding moves are most consistent within writers; however, for all contextualization moves, the writer variance is substantially explained by writer characteristics. This study opens up new avenues for explicating writing quality and writing skill. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores variation in lexico-grammatical register features across text lengths in a large-scale sample of Reddit comments. Very short texts are known to be problematic for many statistical methods, so understanding their nature is important for the corpus-linguistic study of social media, where most contributions are short. I show that the frequencies of linguistic features change with comment length, even between longer comments, although longer texts are often considered similar in statistical terms. Moreover, I classify the variation found between short comments of different lengths into two main patterns, although other patterns can also be found, and there is variation even within these patterns. Furthermore, I interpret the observed differences in terms of register variation. For example, shorter comments appear to be more casual and less edited in terms of their feature makeup, whereas narrative and informational registers seem to favor longer comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examined two factors that influence the effect of relevance instructions on memory for text, namely, instruction specificity and text length. In Experiment 1, 111 undergraduate students read a 1,182-word-long text describing an exotic country. Some students were provided with a general instruction (to focus on one subtopic of the text), others were provided with specific instructions (what-questions inserted into the text), and the rest were provided with a neutral instruction (they were asked just to read for understanding). Those receiving specific instructions recalled the relevant information better; those in the general instruction condition did not show better memory for the relevant information. In Experiment 2, 170 undergraduate students read either the long version of the exotic country text, comprising 1,182 words, or a shortened, 603-word-long version. Half of the students received the general instruction, whereas the rest received the neutral instruction. When the text was short, the participants receiving the general instruction recalled the relevant information better; when the text was long, they did not show better memory for the relevant information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Providing self-access libraries and the texts therein (anthologies of model essays) has long been cited as an essential part of university writing center services, as the reading of model essays has been found to positively affect the reading-writing relationship. When choosing such texts, readability is typically measured via quantitative readability formulae (e.g., the Lexile Readability Formula). However, this practice only measures two (i.e., semantic, syntactic) of the many features that influence readability, leaving others (e.g., text length) unexplored. To address this, this article reports the findings of an exploratory mixed-methods study conducted in an Asian university writing center setting which showed that the informants' ranking of ease and difficulty was significantly different than the Lexile Formula and that text length had a significant positive association with this ranking. It was further found that length was viewed as (a) a primary (i.e., an isolated feature), (b) a conjoined feature (i.e., comprising two or more associated entities where the second impacts the first: interest, vocabulary), and (c) a feature which impacts the influences of other features (interest, vocabulary, and vocabulary in context). The study also offers suggestions for writing studies professionals (teachers, writing center staff) and the publishing industry that text length be included in a hybrid (quantitative-qualitative) procedure when considering the difficulty of model essays found in anthologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Similar to lexical and grammatical choices, the length of a text is also guided by situational constraints and functional needs. Consequently, texts of different lengths are associated with different communicative functions. This study explores the role of register in the functions which are associated with comment lengths on the social media platform Reddit. Since registers differ in their functional and situational makeup, the same text length may also have different functions in different registers. By analyzing variation in the frequencies of register features across comment lengths in a number of popular subreddits in a large-scale dataset of Reddit comments, I show that the functional associations of text length can differ greatly between subreddits, and that comments of the same length can even have virtually opposite functions in different subreddits. Furthermore, some subregisters are clearly differentiated not only by their feature makeup but also by the length of their comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prior research demonstrates that primary and secondary school teachers often find teaching young learners to write in a second language a slow and effortful process. Moreover, students in this age range lack the motivation to write. Therefore, it is important to explore the EFL writing pedagogy suitable for young learners. The present study investigated how story continuation (with or without reading input) under different topic familiarity conditions serves as a viable pedagogical means for secondary school students. Ninety-one Chinese students in four intact classes of comparable proficiency levels were assigned four writing task conditions in a 2 ⨉ 2 factorial design. Group 1 (Fam) was provided with the beginning of a familiar story in L1 Chinese and was required to complete the story in L2 English. Group 2 (UnFam) had the same task as Group 1, with an unfamiliar story. Group 3 (Fam+Input) was initially provided with the complete familiar story in Chinese (the same story as Group 1) as reading input and were then instructed to write the story in English with the reading material taken away. Group 4 (Unfam+Input) received the full unfamiliar story in Chinese (the same story as Group 2) as input before writing. Again they were not allowed to refer to the reading in the composing process. The results revealed that the young learners who wrote on familiar topics (Groups 1 and 3) produced longer texts and demonstrated greater lexical diversity than those with unfamiliar stories (Groups 2 and 4), although topic familiarity did not affect their writing quality or lexical sophistication. As for the story continuation conditions, students who completed writing the story without the L1 reading input on the topics (Groups 1 and 2) developed longer compositions and better writing quality than those with such input (Groups 3 and 4), although their lexical profiles (both lexical diversity and lexical sophistication) remained uninfluenced. Pedagogical implications for EFL writing among young learners were also discussed in the present study.

Prior research demonstrates that primary and secondary school teachers often find teaching young learners to write in a second language a slow and effortful process. Moreover, students in this age range lack the motivation to write. Therefore, it is important to explore the EFL writing pedagogy suitable for young learners. The present study investigated how story continuation (with or without reading input) under different topic familiarity conditions serves as a viable pedagogical means for secondary school students. Ninetyone Chinese students in four intact classes of comparable proficiency levels were assigned four writing task conditions in a 2 x 2 factorial design. Group 1 (Fam) was provided with the beginning of a familiar story in L1 Chinese and was required to complete the story in L2 English. Group 2 (UnFam) had the same task as Group 1, with an unfamiliar story. Group 3 (Fam+Input) was initially provided with the complete familiar story in Chinese (the same story as Group 1) as reading input and were then instructed to write the story in English with the reading material taken away. Group 4 (Unfam+Input) received the full unfamiliar story in Chinese (the same story as Group 2) as input before writing. Again they were not allowed to refer to the reading in the composing process. The results revealed that the young learners who wrote on familiar topics (Groups 1 and 3) produced longer texts and demonstrated greater lexical diversity than those with unfamiliar stories (Groups 2 and 4), although topic familiarity did not affect their writing quality or lexical sophistication. As for the story continuation conditions, students who completed writing the story without the L1 reading input on the topics (Groups 1 and 2) developed longer compositions and better writing quality than those with such input (Groups 3 and 4), although their lexical profiles (both lexical diversity and lexical sophistication) remained uninfluenced. Pedagogical implications for EFL writing among young learners were also discussed in the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The assessment of text quality is a transdisciplinary issue concerning the research areas of educational assessment, language technology, and classroom instruction. Text length has been found to strongly influence human judgment of text quality. The question of whether text length is a construct-relevant aspect of writing competence or a source of judgment bias has been discussed controversially. This paper used both a correlational and an experimental approach to investigate this question. Secondary analyses were performed on a large-scale dataset with highly trained raters, showing an effect of text length beyond language proficiency. Furthermore, an experimental study found that pre-service teachers tended to undervalue text length when compared to professional ratings. The findings are discussed with respect to the role of training and context in writing assessment.

The assessment of text quality is a transdisciplinary issue concerning the research areas of educational assessment, language technology, and classroom instruction. Text length has been found to strongly influence human judgment of text quality. The question of whether text length is a construct-relevant aspect of writing competence or a source of judgment bias has been discussed controversially. This paper used both a correlational and an experimental approach to investigate this question. Secondary analyses were performed on a large-scale dataset with highly trained raters, showing an effect of text length beyond language proficiency. Furthermore, an experimental study found that pre-service teachers tended to undervalue text length when compared to professional ratings. The findings are discussed with respect to the role of training and context in writing assessment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variability is common in language sample analysis (LSA), arising from personal factors such as age or level of education, or from factors within the text such as its length and purpose. Variability can affect interpretation of results in clinical practice and research studies, as well as the ability to detect change in individuals over time. This article focuses on sample length and time-based variability in the LSA literature and how it has been addressed through a scoping review. We then propose a method for estimating the effect of this common source of variability to allow determination of reliable change in individuals over time. Although some sources of variability are acknowledged in the research literature and clinical evidence-based practice, there has been no consistent method to account for these. The proposed method we present offers a means to address text length and time-based variability and materials and examples to facilitate its implementation in future studies and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Electronic Turkish Studies is the property of Electronic Turkish Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors deal with one of the key issues in teaching translation, namely selecting suitable texts for in-class translation training. Translation belongs to the core courses in the study programme “Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication” at the Faculty of Applied Languages, University of Economics in Bratislava. For the text to be selected for the purpose of its didactisation, and in this way to contribute to the development of translation skills, it has to fulfil numerous criteria. The focus of this paper is on text topic and its content, text type, text length, and degree of text complexity. Learners need to be prepared for diverse situations; therefore they have to be exposed to diverse text types in terms of topic and genres. As far as the criterion of text length is concerned, we consider shorter texts more suitable for training translation, because they enable teachers to work with several texts within one lesson unit and study texts on various topics. We deal with the text complexity in terms of content, as well as syntactic structures and lexical density. Text complexity has to be adapted to learners’ language, professional and cultural level of students. Features of this kind of text and criteria of text selection described in the paper are based on domestic and international sources as well as on authors’ experience in teaching translation and their own translation activities.

This study examines the effects of text length and question type on Korean EFL readers' reading comprehension of the fill-in-the-blank items in Korean CSAT. A total of 100 Korean EFL college students participated in the study. After divided into three different proficiency groups, the participants took a reading comprehension test which consisted of 4 reading passages (2 short and 2 long) from the Korean CSAT, followed by multiple-choice fill-in-the-blank questions and open-ended inference questions. The longer version of the passages was made from its originally restored version in which one or two paragraphs were added. The results showed that the college students performed better on the long passages than the short ones. In addition, the college students' reading comprehension test performance was affected differently depending on the type of questions. The findings of the study provided implications on how to select and construct reading passages for high-stake nationwide examinations, such as the Korean CSAT. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated a new writing task that utilizes drawing to elicit students' language and original thinking. Two forms of pictures were designed and administered to 118 children. One form was conventional and consisted of completed pictures, requiring students to simply describe the pictures in writing. The other form, which was new, comprised incomplete pictures, requiring students to first draw and then describe them in writing. The descriptions were scored for originality (to represent creative thinking) and vocabulary and text length (to reflect linguistic domains). The originality scores were higher for students who were given the unfinished pictures regardless of their writing proficiency. Vocabulary diversity and text length fluency depended on the level of writing proficiency: for poor writers, these abilities were facilitated when they were given completed pictures, while for good writers, the form variation made no difference. This study highlights that to stimulate original thinking, an unfinished picture form is useful because it affords students opportunities to express unique ideas regardless of poor or good writers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies is the property of Journal of Language & Linguistics Studies and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Recently, it was demonstrated that generalized entropies of order α offer novel and important opportunities to quantify the similarity of symbol sequences where α is a free parameter. Varying this parameter makes it possible to magnify differences between different texts at specific scales of the corresponding word frequency spectrum. For the analysis of the statistical properties of natural languages, this is especially interesting, because textual data are characterized by Zipf’s law, i.e., there are very few word types that occur very often (e.g., function words expressing grammatical relationships) and many word types with a very low frequency (e.g., content words carrying most of the meaning of a sentence). Here, this approach is systematically and empirically studied by analyzing the lexical dynamics of the German weekly news magazine Der Spiegel (consisting of approximately 365,000 articles and 237,000,000 words that were published between 1947 and 2017). We show that, analogous to most other measures in quantitative linguistics, similarity measures based on generalized entropies depend heavily on the sample size (i.e., text length). We argue that this makes it difficult to quantify lexical dynamics and language change and show that standard sampling approaches do not solve this problem. We discuss the consequences of the results for the statistical analysis of languages.

Text length varies in social networks, such as IMDB long text, Twitter short text, and long–short mixed text. For these complex situations, the time series, convolution, or fine-tuned BERT models are used in existing text steganalysis methods almost. However, these methods do not simultaneously consider higher detection accuracy and lower training time at the same time. To alleviate this dilemma, this paper proposes a novel text steganalysis method. First, the proposed method maps words into a semantic space containing position information. Second, a variable parameter attention layer scaled appropriately according to text length is designed, it achieves the purpose that the entire parameter amount of the model is not redundant and can ensure effective detection. Finally, the steganalysis features are enhanced by the residual linear layer. For long, short, and mixed text datasets, comparing experiments show that the proposed method has higher detection accuracy, fewer parameters, and shorter training time than existing methods. Among them, the advantage of this method is more obvious for long and mixed texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which examined word count in each article published in the medical journals "The New England Journal of Medicine," "The Lancet," "Journal of the American Medical Association," "The British Medical Journal" and "Annals of Internal Medicine." The variables include types of article, the absolute mean difference in word count, and abstract word limit. The requirements set by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) for publishing are discussed.

The paper considers the writing abilities of Hebrew-speaking grade school and middle school students from mid-high compared with low SES backgrounds, as reflected in stories and compositions they wrote on the topic of friendship. A range of linguistic means of expression were employed as diagnostic of school-age written text construction, focusing on the lexicon and including both devices applicable in different languages (overall text length in words and clauses, syntactic clause density, and lexical diversity and density as reflected in proportions of content words) as well as Hebrew-specific features (verb-pattern morphology and construct-state noun compounds). Analyses showed these features to differentiate across the independent variables of the study-age-schooling level, and SES background, and text genre (narrative vs. expository). In terms of genre, expository-type essays usually had denser and more lexically diverse texture than stories. In developmental perspective, lexical diagnostics improved in the texts produced by 13–14 year-olds in comparison with those of 9–10 year-olds. Finally, texts produced by middle-class children attending well-established schools were in general of better lexical quality than those produced by children from disadvantaged backgrounds attending low-achieving schools. Keywords:linguistic usage; school-age language development; SES background; discourse genre; clause length; text length, lexical quality; Hebrew [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the impact of text length on reading comprehension. Three reading comprehension passages accompanied by 30 items were reduced to two thirds of their original lengths. The truncated versions along with the original version were randomly administered to 100 male and female college students of English (50) and non-English majors (50). Although the participants performed marginally better on the shortened version of the test, a two-way ANOVA revealed that the length of the text did not have any statistically significant effect on the students' performance on the two versions of the test. No interaction between the length of the test and the students' major was found either. Further analysis of the data indicated that sex did not have any significant effect on the performance of the students on the two versions of the test. The article concludes with suggestions for further investigations into the issue in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• MATTR and two versions of MTLD are highly stable indices for analyzing short texts. • TTR, Root TTR, and Log TTR were not stable for any text length in the analysis. • Essay prompt and proficiency level had a small but significant effect on scores. Lexical diversity (LD) is an important feature of a second language (L2) writer's lexical knowledge, and indices of LD have been widely used in the field of writing assessment (e.g., Cumming et al., 2006 ; Engber, 1995). Research with longer native speaker (L1) texts has indicated, however, that many commonly used LD indices are sensitive to text length and may conflate lexical breadth and fluency. Because of the importance of measuring LD in L2 writing assessment research, it is essential to know the degree to which particular LD indices are resistant to text length effects and the minimum text lengths at which these indices produce stable values. In this study, we investigate text length effects for nine indices of LD in a corpus of 4542 L2 argumentative essays. The results indicate that MATTR (Covington & McFall, 2010) and two versions of MTLD (McCarthy, 2005 ; McCarthy & Jarvis, 2010) are the most stable of the indices included in the study. MATTR performs particularly well, maintaining a high degree of stability across all text lengths. Comparisons based on essay prompt and proficiency level are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]