A Multi-Dimensional analysis of advanced written L2 Spanish

Written academic discourse in Spanish as a second language has been extensively described from a textual linguistic perspective. However, second-language researchers have not embraced corpus methodologies to analyze register variation in learner corpora. This study adds to our understanding of the types of discourse that advanced Spanish learners produce in academic writing through a Multi-Dimensional analysis of a corpus of L2 Spanish writing (998,686 words) from a graduate program for teaching Spanish. Results uncovered six significant factors that accounted for 56.76 percent of the variation. Dimension 1, the principal component, clustered 47 co-occurring features in expository discourse related to the instructional setting and to literary analysis. The remaining five dimensions were discursive variations of expository prose found in that particular context.