Determining the L2 academic writing development stage: a corpus-based research on doctoral dissertations

This corpus-based research investigates features representing different stages of development in Pakistani academic writing (AW) to determine the stage of Pakistani AW in physical and social sciences. Corpus for this research comprises texts from 80 doctoral dissertations and is analyzed through AntConc after tagging with Multidimensional Analysis Tagger (MAT) and TagAnt. Results show Pakistani AW in both disciplines frequently comprising nouns as pre-modifiers that represent Stage-3. These are lower level features used by the writers developing towards higher levels. Therefore, Pakistani advanced level AW in physical and social sciences is positioned at Stage-3. This suggests that Pakistani writers in these disciplines are operating below the expected developmental level specifically Stage-5. These results are found to oppose the general hypothesis i.e. L2 (English as a second language) academic writers frequently use phrasal features at the advanced level. Consequently, Pakistani AW is concluded to be below the required level of language development.