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50 Years of ERIC
50 Years of ERIC
The Education Resources Information Center (ERIC) is celebrating its 50th Birthday! First opened on May 15th, 1964 ERIC continues the long tradition of ongoing innovation and enhancement.

Learn more about the history of ERIC here. PDF icon

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Pay Attention to the Phrasal Structures: Going beyond T-Units--A Response to Weiwei Yang
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Biber, Douglas; Gray, Bethany; Poonpon, Kornwipa – TESOL Quarterly: A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and of Standard English as a Second Dialect, 2013
WeiWei Yang, in her forum piece, raises two main criticisms of the authors' "TQ" article on grammatical complexity: "The study the authors conducted [1] is not capable of answering development-related questions and [2] is mathematically questionable" (Yang, 2013, p. 190). In addition, Yang's article has a third goal that is not explicitly…
Descriptors: Evaluation Methods, Writing (Composition), Phrase Structure, Criticism
Should We Use Characteristics of Conversation to Measure Grammatical Complexity in L2 Writing Development?
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Biber, Douglas; Gray, Bethany; Poonpon, Kornwipa – TESOL Quarterly: A Journal for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages and of Standard English as a Second Dialect, 2011
Studies of L2 writing development usually measure T-units and clausal subordination to assess grammatical complexity, assuming that increased subordination is typical of advanced writing. In this article we challenge this practice by showing that these measures are much more characteristic of conversation than academic writing. The article begins…
Descriptors: Writing (Composition), Nouns, Criticism, English (Second Language)