Dissertation Defense: Yiran Xu
Candidate Name: Yiran Xu
Major: Linguistics
Advisor: Lourdes Ortega, Ph.D.
Title: L2 Writing Complexity in Academic Legal Discourse Development and Assessment under a Curricular Lens
In the past three decades, the construct of second language (L2) writing complexity has been theorized and refined in both second language acquisition (SLA) (Crossley, 2020; Housen, De Clercq, Kuiken, & Vedder, 2019; Lu, 2011; Norris & Ortega, 2009) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) research (Byrne, 2009; Ryshina-Pankova, 2015; Schleppegrell, 2004). The general consensus is that lexical and syntactic variations are regarded as signs of advanced academic writing. The contemporary pedagogy of legal writing, however, is informed by the Plain English Movement (Benson, 1985; Dorney, 1988; Felsenfeld, 1981), which largely discourages the use of overly complex structures and “elegant variations.” The recommendation to use plain English in legal writing thus poses an interesting challenge to the theoretical consensus in SLA and SFL research and raises a question about the actual conceptualization and assessment of writing complexity in legal language classrooms.
This dissertation consists of three interrelated studies and aims to address this paradox by examining the development and assessment of writing complexity (i.e., lexis, syntax, and discourse) in 246 hypothetical legal essays written by 31 international Master of Laws (LL.M.) students over one-year of legal language study at a U.S. Law School. In Study 1, I used a structural, corpus-based approach and tracked the changes of 31 students’ lexical and syntactic complexity in six data collection points over one year and compared the indices with those benchmarked by eight model essays. In Study 2, I offer an in-depth discussion of four students’ distinct developmental trajectories of discourse complexity, which I analyzed through the system of engagement (Martin & White, 2005) from the SFL perspective. Finally, in Study 3, I adopted a mixed-method approach using correlation analyses, think-aloud data, and a focus group interview and investigated two legal instructors’ conceptualizations of writing complexity in the context of assessing hypothetical legal writing using classroom rubrics. Results show that overall students were able to write with significantly more sophisticated vocabulary and, in the second semester, significantly shorter sentences, a pattern consistent with the content of intensive content-based language instruction they received in the Law School program. Additionally, the four distinct individual trajectories of discourse