earticle

영어

The number of Korean study-abroad children has increased in the past decade, on the assumption that studying abroad is one of the most effective ways to become proficient in another language. This research compares the linguistic features of argumentative writing in Korean EFL middle school students who studied abroad and those who had only formal classroom lessons in Korea. It also examines the relationship between the linguistic features and writing proficiency. Sixty-five middle school students (N = 65) participated in this study and their compositions were coded for lexical richness, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, fluency, cohesion, and written discourse features. The results show that the study-abroad group outperformed the group of students who stayed in Korea in fluency and the use of written discourse features. However, there were no significant differences in lexical richness, syntactic complexity, grammatical accuracy, and cohesion. Furthermore, the results from multiple regression analysis indicate that text length, error-free T-unit ratio, and academic word list words could be a significant predictor of the variance of writing scores of both groups. These findings have important pedagogical implications for EFL writing.