Activity 2: Analyze the following text very carefully. Then, complete the table that follows.

This paper purports to assess the linguistic complexity of students’ narratives and reading texts. However, the authors never stated the purpose behind the study. The authors provide no motivations and goals for the study, no research questions, no strong
methodological practices, and very few findings that can be easily interpreted. While reading the study, every new sentence is surprise. There are no details and the entire paper is completely under referenced. Below I will discuss some of the major problems with the paper. First, the authors never provide a rationale for their study. They never give a reason as to why they are studying reading and writing together and they fail to link the two skills. The authors assume that the reader knows the narrative and made no attempt to assist them in developing the narrative of the paper. Another major problem with the paper is the naiveté that is apparent in the literature review, the methods, and the analysis. The literature review is perhaps two pages long and boost up on their knowledge of L2 writing and reading theory before they submit a paper to a professional journal. It is interesting that the language background of the participants is never made explicit (participants are at the mid beginners to high beginners level in using English is a second language). The extent to which any results found in the study would be widely generalizable to what is typically conceived as an EFL/ESL learner is not clear. Moreover, the author continually draw on literature meant for an L1 acquisition audience and therefore of dubious extension to L2 contexts. The methods section contains no details at all. Ten participants per grade level, in a stratified random sample, hardly seemed enough to get much stable data. Since, there are only-begotten ten participants per grade level on both accredited and non-accredited schools due to
logistical constraints; the paper is more on exploratory study. In other words, it seems a stretch to ask most journal readers to generalize from such a limited sample from such a specific population. The authors state that “pupils were not given limits as to time and number of words, for them to be relaxed in their narrative production” (p.5). However, later the authors explain that those written data also form the basis of the corpus used for analysis. How does this differential production affect the results of the analysis? Surely, a participant who produces 1,000 words will have different results from one who produce 500. It is not clear how the authors can assert any sort of pattern from linguistic ‘snapshot’ from just 10 students per school, producing such heterogeneous data samples. Again, from such a modest sample size. In general, the paper is hard to read. This likely goes back to the lack of research problems. There are few transitions and, organizationally, the paper does not set up any expectations for the reader. The first paragraph is a great example because it contains a single sentence and at least five different clauses. The final paragraph in the introduction (right before the methods sections) is another example. I have read that paragraph four times and am not sure how to process it. There are major problems with this paper, but I do not have a time or the energy to discuss them all. The authors really need to rethink the purpose of the collected data and educate themselves in the field of L2 reading and writing. I would highly suggest that the authors reread issues of the journal of Second Language Writing and Reading in a Foreign Language.

Type of Document:_____

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Intended Reader:_____

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