Measuring possible indicators of successful academic writing among EFL teaching undergraduate students

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to investigate several potential indicators of successful academic writing and their connection to assignment grades as a possible path toward better teaching of academic writing at the upper secondary level in Sweden. These indicators are referencing (REF), academic vocabulary (AV), and reporting verbs (RV). Our research questions were to examine to what extent the final grades on independent research synthesis papers at Malmö University relate to the use of these three indicators. To that end, we quantitatively assessed the indicators’ relationship to grades (U/G/VG) on 28 4th-year teaching students’ independent research synthesis papers. We examined REF from two perspectives: quality of sources and source integration. AV was assessed by examining the percentage of words in student texts that appeared in the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL). We assessed RV as an indicator by calculating the frequency of RVs in student texts and which types of RVs they favored, as measured by the ARGUE/SHOW/FIND/THINK framework of RV usage. We found very small positive connections between AV percentage, RV frequency, and grades, but small negative connections between measures of reference quality and grades, and found that there were no meaningful differences in RV usage between the three different groups. However, we found that measures of source integration related strongly to the grades on the papers. Numerous factors could explain our findings, notably the small sample size, our unique RV master list, and the rigorous supervision process of these papers at Malmö University. To establish any conclusive results, further research is required.