Ambiguity in Chinese College Students’ L2 Tertiary-Level Writing: A Thematic Analysis
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The current study investigated ambiguity errors that characterise the L2 tertiary-level writing of Chinese college students. Data were drawn from 56 authentic English writings from 11 students of different disciplines across 10 different Chinese institutions. A thematic analysis was conducted to examine the ambiguity error patterns at the lexical and syntactic levels. Lexical ambiguities were found to include Chinglish, ambiguous references, and ambiguous abstractions, and syntactic ambiguities were found to consist of misplaced and dangling modifiers. It was also found that lexical ambiguity far exceeded syntactic ambiguity. The results demonstrate Chinese English as a foreign language (EFL) students’ limited L2 linguistic competence and struggle with accurate L2 production. This study aims to draw attention to the unpreparedness of Chinese EFL students for tertiary-level L2 writing and to the need for linguistic support in their written L2 output. Given the increasing demand for academic writing, writing with clarity is of great significance for EFL students. Whereas ambiguity resolution in L2 input has received much scholarly attention, limited empirical research has been conducted on ambiguity errors that characterise EFL students’ L2 written output. Therefore, the current study aims to fill this gap by examining the ambiguity patterns that characterise the L2 writing of Chinese college students, thus informing future teaching.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".