The development of writing in English and Spanish as foreign languages

This article presents the first results of the study of argumentative essays in English as a foreign language and in Spanish as a foreign language and as a native language, carried out at Radboud University Nijmegen (formerly the University of Nijmegen) between 2002 and 2008. The aim of the project is to compare teachers' holistic assessments with the results of the quantitative analysis of syntactic and lexical features of the essays and measure the development in writing skill from one year to the next. The first part of the current article discusses general aspects of native language and foreign language writing, and establishes the place of our project in the discipline. In the second part we present the methodology adopted, and the results of the quantitative analyses that have been carried out so far.