General Characteristics of Linguistic Feature of Language Registers in Writing among English as a Second Language Learners

Abstract

The linguistic demands of academic writing require learners to appropriately construct the lexico-grammatical structures to form their language registers in writing. Thus, lexical and grammatical analysis is a crucial process that provides an in-depth explanation of linguistic features of language registers in order to help learners develop their writing competence and for the teachers to provide the basis for instructions. However, there were few studies conducted to determine the characteristics of language registers in the context of English as a second language learning. For this reason, the main objective of this study was to determine the general characteristics of linguistic feature in terms of lexico-grammatical structures according to their linguistic aspects. Hence, a descriptive quantitative research design was utilized in this study by which the general characteristics of linguistic feature of students’ language registers in essays were analyzed using a textual analysis approach according to the lexicon and grammatical items using a computer software, an automatic grammatical tagger. Based on Biber’s analysis of Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, the results revealed that the general characteristics of the linguistic feature of respondents' language register in terms of lexico-grammatical structures are nouns, verbs, and prepositions which made up about 56% of all content words in students’ essays. This study also highlights that writing as a variable in language research goes beyond simply looking at the learners’ writing competence. Taken together, such linguistic descriptions would provide the basis for more principled approaches to ESL teaching methods in terms of lexico-grammatical structures which are fundamental aspects of language registers in writing.