Name: ________________________________ Date: __________________ 1,000 words will have different resultd from linguistic ‘snapshots’ from just

m linguistic ‘snapshots’ from just 10 students per

Grade & Section: ________________________
I. Part A. 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 motivation 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 a surprise. There are no details and the entire paper is
completely under referenced.
Below I will discuss some of the major problems with 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 naivete that is apparent in the
literature review, the methods and the analysis. The literature review is perhaps two pages
long and full of unsupported statements, conjecture and limited viewpoints. The authors
really need to boost up on their knowlege 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 as 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
authors continually draw on literature meant for an L1 acquisition audience and therefore if
dubious extension to L2 contexts.
school, producing such heterogenous 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 section) is another example. I have read that paragrapah four times and
am not sure how to process it.
There are other major problems with this paper, but I do not have the 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
Purpose of the
review
Intended
Reader

The methods section contains no detail at all. Ten participants per grade level, in a
stratified random smaple, hardly seemed enough to get much stable data. Since there are
only 10 participants per grade level on both accredited and non-accredited schools due to
Strengths
logistical constraint, the paper is more of an 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. Teh authors state that “pupils were not given limits as to time and number
words, for them to be relaxed in their narrative production”. However, later the authors Weaknesses
explain that those written data also form the basis corpus used for analysis. How does this
differential production affect the results of the analysis? Surely, a participant who produces
Part B: Revise the text given in Part A by eliminating its weakness and retaining its strenghts.
Feel free to add other information, if necessary.