How predictive is tense for language profiency? A cautionary tale

Abstract

The role of language proficiency in second language(L2) writing has been widely discussed in English as Second Language(ESL) research. The literature suggests that syntactic as well as lexical choices are influenced by their writer's language proficiency. Exactly which linguistic indices are related to the writing performance (and to what degree) is a central topic in the ESL literature. This paper reexamines tense and the related concepts voice and aspect as well as the syntactic complexity measure level of embedding. Tense has variously been reported as useful and as not useful for predicting proficiency. We analyze its correlation to proficiency levels in ICNALE and contrast this with the performance of different feature combinations and for different learner groups.