A Multidimensional Analysis of Academic Writing: A Comparative Study of Saudi and British University Students’ Writing
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Academic writing is one of the most crucial skills for university students across the globe; however, the conventions of writing vary across different cultures. This research study used a multidimensional approach to analyze Saudi students' writings compared to British students. A specialized corpus of Saudi academic English writing (CSAEW) was developed to explore interdisciplinary lexico-grammatical patterns. The data was collected from the undergraduate students enrolled in the universities from three regions across the Kingdom. The CSAEW was compared with the British Academic Writing English corpus. Biber's multidimensional model was used to examine linguistic features along dimensions such as involvement, information, argumentation, narration, and abstraction. The study provides evidence about how Saudi students prefer particular lexical and grammatical patterns over others and how Saudi academic writing is distinguished compared to British academic English. The study results indicate that CSAEW is more explicit and non-narrative than BCAW. There are marked differences on dimensions 1, 4, and 5. The mean scores of CSAEW and BCAW fall on the opposite side of the continuum. The findings document the patterns of linguistic variation in Saudi students' academic writing compared to that of British students. Based on the pattern of variation, the study provides some recommendations for pedagogical practices to improve Saudi students’ writing skills.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".