vocabulary for literature review

17 strong academic phrases to write your literature review (+ real examples)

A well-written academic literature review not only builds upon existing knowledge and publications but also involves critical reflection, comparison, contrast, and identifying research gaps. The following 17 strong academic key phrases can assist you in writing a critical and reflective literature review.

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Academic key phrases to present existing knowledge in a literature review

Academic key phrases to contrast and compare findings in a literature review, academic key phrases to highlight research gaps in a literature review, the topic has received significant interest within the wider literature..

Example: “ The topic of big data and its integration with AI has received significant interest within the wider literature .” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 4 )

The topic gained considerable attention in the academic literature in…

Example:  “ The relationship between BITs and FDI gained considerable attention in the academic literature in the last two decades .” ( Amendolagine and Prota, 2021, p. 173 )

Studies have identified…

Example: “ Studies have identified the complexities of implementing AI based systems within government and the public sector .” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 6 )

Researchers have discussed…

Example: “ Researchers have discussed the ethical dimensions of AI and implications for greater use of the technology. ” ( Dwivedi et al. 2021, p. 6)

Recent work demonstrated that…

Example: “Recent work demonstrated that dune grasses with similar morphological traits can build contrasting landscapes due to differences in their spatial shoot organization.” ( Van de Ven, 2022 et al., p. 1339 )

Existing research frequently attributes…

Example:  “Existing research frequently attributes these challenges to AI’s technical complexity, demand for data, and unpredictable interactions.” ( Yang et al., 2020, p. 174 )

Prior research has hypothesized that…

Example:  “Prior research has hypothesized that racial and ethnic disparities may be mitigated if the patient and provider share the same race due to improved communication and increased trust” ( Otte, 2022, p. 1 )

Prior studies have found that…

Example:  “ Prior studies have found that court-referred individuals are more likely to complete relationship violence intervention programs (RVIP) than self-referred individuals. ” ( Evans et al. 2022, p. 1 )

You may also like: 26 powerful academic phrases to write your introduction (+ real examples)

While some scholars…, others…

Example: “On the sustainable development of microcredit, some scholars emphasize the effect of its poverty alleviation, while some scholars emphasize the factors such as institutional innovation and government support.” ( Huang et al., 2021, p. 2117 )

The findings of Scholar A showcase that… . Scholar B , on the other hand, found…

Example: “ The findings of Arinto (2016) call for administrators concerning the design of faculty development programs, provision of faculty support, and strategic planning for online distance learning implementation across the institution. Francisco and Nuqui (2020) on the other hand found that the new normal leadership is an adaptive one while staying strong on their commitment. ” ( Asio and Bayucca, 2021, p. 20 )

Interestingly, all the arguments refer to…

Example:  “Interestingly, all the arguments above refer to daily role transitions—more specifically: role transitions on teleworking days—as an important explanatory mechanism for both the possible conflict-reducing effect and the potential conflict enhancing effects of telework.”  ( Delanoeije et al., 2019, p. 1845 )

This argument is similar to…

Example: “The third argument against physician involvement in lethal injection is that physicians are prohibited from deliberately harming patients or the argument from nonmaleficence. This argument is similar to the argument from healing but has different implications and must therefore be considered independently.” ( Sawicki, 2022, p. 22 )

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Yet, it remains unknown how…

Example: “Yet, it remains unknown how findings from aeolian landscapes translate to aquatic systems and how young clonally expanding plants in hydrodynamically exposed conditions overcome these establishment thresholds by optimizing shoot placement.” ( Van de Ven, 2022 et al., p. 1339 )

There is, however, still little research on…

Example:  “There is, however, still little research on what integrated STEM approaches require from schools and teachers, and on the potential obstacles that may prevent teachers from running this kind of teaching.”  ( Bungum and Mogstad, 2022, p. 2 )

Existing studies have failed to address…

Example: “ University–industry relations (UIR) are usually analysed by the knowledge transfer channels, but existing studies have failed to address what knowledge content is being transferred – impacting the technology output aimed by the partnership.”  (Dalmarco et al. 2019, p. 1314 )

Several scholars have recommended to move away…

Example: “Several scholars have recommended to move away from such a stable-level approach (i.e. using a global judgment of work-home conflict) to a dynamic episodes approach ” ( Delanoeije et al., 2019, p. 1847 )

New approaches are needed to address…

Example:  “ Accurate computational approaches are needed to address this gap and to enable large-scale structural bioinformatics. ” ( Jumper et al. 2021,p. 583 )

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Methodology

• How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates

Published on January 2, 2023 by Shona McCombes . Revised on September 11, 2023.

What is a literature review? A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources on a specific topic. It provides an overview of current knowledge, allowing you to identify relevant theories, methods, and gaps in the existing research that you can later apply to your paper, thesis, or dissertation topic .

There are five key steps to writing a literature review:

• Search for relevant literature
• Evaluate sources
• Identify themes, debates, and gaps
• Outline the structure
• Write your literature review

A good literature review doesn’t just summarize sources—it analyzes, synthesizes , and critically evaluates to give a clear picture of the state of knowledge on the subject.

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Table of contents

What is the purpose of a literature review, examples of literature reviews, step 1 – search for relevant literature, step 2 – evaluate and select sources, step 3 – identify themes, debates, and gaps, step 4 – outline your literature review’s structure, step 5 – write your literature review, free lecture slides, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions, introduction.

• Quick Run-through
• Step 1 & 2

When you write a thesis , dissertation , or research paper , you will likely have to conduct a literature review to situate your research within existing knowledge. The literature review gives you a chance to:

• Demonstrate your familiarity with the topic and its scholarly context
• Develop a theoretical framework and methodology for your research
• Position your work in relation to other researchers and theorists
• Show how your research addresses a gap or contributes to a debate
• Evaluate the current state of research and demonstrate your knowledge of the scholarly debates around your topic.

Writing literature reviews is a particularly important skill if you want to apply for graduate school or pursue a career in research. We’ve written a step-by-step guide that you can follow below.

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See an example

Writing literature reviews can be quite challenging! A good starting point could be to look at some examples, depending on what kind of literature review you’d like to write.

• Example literature review #1: “Why Do People Migrate? A Review of the Theoretical Literature” ( Theoretical literature review about the development of economic migration theory from the 1950s to today.)
• Example literature review #2: “Literature review as a research methodology: An overview and guidelines” ( Methodological literature review about interdisciplinary knowledge acquisition and production.)
• Example literature review #3: “The Use of Technology in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Thematic literature review about the effects of technology on language acquisition.)
• Example literature review #4: “Learners’ Listening Comprehension Difficulties in English Language Learning: A Literature Review” ( Chronological literature review about how the concept of listening skills has changed over time.)

You can also check out our templates with literature review examples and sample outlines at the links below.

Download Word doc Download Google doc

Before you begin searching for literature, you need a clearly defined topic .

If you are writing the literature review section of a dissertation or research paper, you will search for literature related to your research problem and questions .

Make a list of keywords

Start by creating a list of keywords related to your research question. Include each of the key concepts or variables you’re interested in, and list any synonyms and related terms. You can add to this list as you discover new keywords in the process of your literature search.

• Social media, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok
• Body image, self-perception, self-esteem, mental health
• Generation Z, teenagers, adolescents, youth

Search for relevant sources

Use your keywords to begin searching for sources. Some useful databases to search for journals and articles include:

• Your university’s library catalogue
• Google Scholar
• Project Muse (humanities and social sciences)
• Medline (life sciences and biomedicine)
• EconLit (economics)
• Inspec (physics, engineering and computer science)

You can also use boolean operators to help narrow down your search.

Make sure to read the abstract to find out whether an article is relevant to your question. When you find a useful book or article, you can check the bibliography to find other relevant sources.

You likely won’t be able to read absolutely everything that has been written on your topic, so it will be necessary to evaluate which sources are most relevant to your research question.

For each publication, ask yourself:

• What question or problem is the author addressing?
• What are the key concepts and how are they defined?
• What are the key theories, models, and methods?
• Does the research use established frameworks or take an innovative approach?
• What are the results and conclusions of the study?
• How does the publication relate to other literature in the field? Does it confirm, add to, or challenge established knowledge?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the research?

Make sure the sources you use are credible , and make sure you read any landmark studies and major theories in your field of research.

You can use our template to summarize and evaluate sources you’re thinking about using. Click on either button below to download.

Take notes and cite your sources

As you read, you should also begin the writing process. Take notes that you can later incorporate into the text of your literature review.

It is important to keep track of your sources with citations to avoid plagiarism . It can be helpful to make an annotated bibliography , where you compile full citation information and write a paragraph of summary and analysis for each source. This helps you remember what you read and saves time later in the process.

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To begin organizing your literature review’s argument and structure, be sure you understand the connections and relationships between the sources you’ve read. Based on your reading and notes, you can look for:

• Trends and patterns (in theory, method or results): do certain approaches become more or less popular over time?
• Themes: what questions or concepts recur across the literature?
• Debates, conflicts and contradictions: where do sources disagree?
• Pivotal publications: are there any influential theories or studies that changed the direction of the field?
• Gaps: what is missing from the literature? Are there weaknesses that need to be addressed?

This step will help you work out the structure of your literature review and (if applicable) show how your own research will contribute to existing knowledge.

• Most research has focused on young women.
• There is an increasing interest in the visual aspects of social media.
• But there is still a lack of robust research on highly visual platforms like Instagram and Snapchat—this is a gap that you could address in your own research.

There are various approaches to organizing the body of a literature review. Depending on the length of your literature review, you can combine several of these strategies (for example, your overall structure might be thematic, but each theme is discussed chronologically).

Chronological

The simplest approach is to trace the development of the topic over time. However, if you choose this strategy, be careful to avoid simply listing and summarizing sources in order.

Try to analyze patterns, turning points and key debates that have shaped the direction of the field. Give your interpretation of how and why certain developments occurred.

If you have found some recurring central themes, you can organize your literature review into subsections that address different aspects of the topic.

For example, if you are reviewing literature about inequalities in migrant health outcomes, key themes might include healthcare policy, language barriers, cultural attitudes, legal status, and economic access.

Methodological

If you draw your sources from different disciplines or fields that use a variety of research methods , you might want to compare the results and conclusions that emerge from different approaches. For example:

• Look at what results have emerged in qualitative versus quantitative research
• Discuss how the topic has been approached by empirical versus theoretical scholarship
• Divide the literature into sociological, historical, and cultural sources

Theoretical

A literature review is often the foundation for a theoretical framework . You can use it to discuss various theories, models, and definitions of key concepts.

You might argue for the relevance of a specific theoretical approach, or combine various theoretical concepts to create a framework for your research.

Like any other academic text , your literature review should have an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion . What you include in each depends on the objective of your literature review.

The introduction should clearly establish the focus and purpose of the literature review.

Depending on the length of your literature review, you might want to divide the body into subsections. You can use a subheading for each theme, time period, or methodological approach.

As you write, you can follow these tips:

• Summarize and synthesize: give an overview of the main points of each source and combine them into a coherent whole
• Analyze and interpret: don’t just paraphrase other researchers — add your own interpretations where possible, discussing the significance of findings in relation to the literature as a whole
• Critically evaluate: mention the strengths and weaknesses of your sources
• Write in well-structured paragraphs: use transition words and topic sentences to draw connections, comparisons and contrasts

In the conclusion, you should summarize the key findings you have taken from the literature and emphasize their significance.

When you’ve finished writing and revising your literature review, don’t forget to proofread thoroughly before submitting. Not a language expert? Check out Scribbr’s professional proofreading services !

This article has been adapted into lecture slides that you can use to teach your students about writing a literature review.

Scribbr slides are free to use, customize, and distribute for educational purposes.

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If you want to know more about the research process , methodology , research bias , or statistics , make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples.

• Sampling methods
• Simple random sampling
• Stratified sampling
• Cluster sampling
• Likert scales
• Reproducibility

 Statistics

• Null hypothesis
• Statistical power
• Probability distribution
• Effect size
• Poisson distribution

Research bias

• Optimism bias
• Cognitive bias
• Implicit bias
• Hawthorne effect
• Anchoring bias
• Explicit bias

A literature review is a survey of scholarly sources (such as books, journal articles, and theses) related to a specific topic or research question .

It is often written as part of a thesis, dissertation , or research paper , in order to situate your work in relation to existing knowledge.

There are several reasons to conduct a literature review at the beginning of a research project:

• To familiarize yourself with the current state of knowledge on your topic
• To ensure that you’re not just repeating what others have already done
• To identify gaps in knowledge and unresolved problems that your research can address
• To develop your theoretical framework and methodology
• To provide an overview of the key findings and debates on the topic

Writing the literature review shows your reader how your work relates to existing research and what new insights it will contribute.

The literature review usually comes near the beginning of your thesis or dissertation . After the introduction , it grounds your research in a scholarly field and leads directly to your theoretical framework or methodology .

A literature review is a survey of credible sources on a topic, often used in dissertations , theses, and research papers . Literature reviews give an overview of knowledge on a subject, helping you identify relevant theories and methods, as well as gaps in existing research. Literature reviews are set up similarly to other  academic texts , with an introduction , a main body, and a conclusion .

An  annotated bibliography is a list of  source references that has a short description (called an annotation ) for each of the sources. It is often assigned as part of the research process for a  paper .  

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McCombes, S. (2023, September 11). How to Write a Literature Review | Guide, Examples, & Templates. Scribbr. Retrieved April 15, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/dissertation/literature-review/

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Essential Vocabulary for Crafting an Effective Literature Review

• backlinkworks
• Writing Articles & Reviews
• September 18, 2023

Introduction

A literature review is an essential component of any academic or research project. IT provides an overview of the existing body of knowledge, identifies gaps in research, and helps to establish the significance of your own study. To craft an effective literature review, IT is crucial to possess a strong understanding of the vocabulary and terms commonly used in this field. In this article, we will explore some key vocabulary that will help you enhance and improve your literature reviews.

The Vocabulary

1. synthesis.

Synthesis refers to the process of combining various sources in a literature review to create a comprehensive and coherent analysis. IT involves summarizing and integrating multiple studies, identifying common themes, and highlighting areas of disagreement or gaps in knowledge.

2. Meta-analysis

Meta-analysis involves the statistical analysis of multiple studies to generate a more robust understanding of a particular topic. IT quantitatively combines the results of various studies to produce a summary effect size, allowing researchers to draw more reliable conclusions.

3. Literature Gap

A literature gap refers to an identified area in the existing body of knowledge where there is limited research or information available. Identifying literature gaps is important for establishing the significance of your own research and contributing to the field by addressing these gaps.

4. Conceptual Framework

A conceptual framework is a structure that outlines the key concepts, variables, and relationships that guide a research study. IT provides a theoretical foundation to organize and analyze the relevant literature, helping to shape the overall direction of the literature review.

5. Empirical Research

Empirical research involves the collection and analysis of data to answer a research question. IT often includes experiments, surveys, or observations to gather evidence and support claims. Understanding empirical research is important when evaluating the quality and credibility of the studies included in your literature review.

6. Methodology

Methodology refers to the overall approach or strategy used to conduct a research study. IT includes the specific methods, data collection techniques, and analytical tools employed in the research process. Familiarity with various research methodologies will enable you to critically evaluate and compare the approaches used in the studies you review.

Mastering the essential vocabulary for crafting an effective literature review is vital for producing high-quality academic work. By understanding and correctly using these terms, you can develop coherent and well-structured literature reviews that contribute to the advancement of knowledge in your chosen field. Make sure to incorporate these vocabulary words into your writing to enhance clarity, precision, and the overall impact of your literature review.

Q1: Why is a literature review important?

A1: A literature review is crucial as IT provides an overview of existing knowledge, helps identify gaps, establishes the significance of your study, and provides context for your research question.

Q2: How do I identify literature gaps?

A2: Literature gaps can be identified by thoroughly reviewing the existing literature, looking for areas with limited research or unanswered questions, and determining where your research can make a valuable contribution.

Q3: What is the purpose of a conceptual framework?

A3: A conceptual framework provides a theoretical foundation for your research study. IT helps to organize the relevant literature and guides the analysis by identifying key concepts, variables, and relationships.

Q4: How can I evaluate the quality of empirical research?

A4: Evaluating the quality of empirical research involves considering factors such as the study’s methodology, sample size, data collection techniques, statistical analysis, and the validity and reliability of the results.

Q5: Why is IT important to understand different research methodologies?

A5: Understanding different research methodologies enables you to critically evaluate and compare studies, identify the strengths and limitations of different approaches, and determine the appropriateness of the methods used in the studies you include in your literature review.

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Language of the literature review

The language that you use in a literature review is important for informing readers where you stand on relevant debates on your topic or issue. In a writer-responsible academic culture, it is your job to lead readers to the meanings and conclusions that you want them to make. Since literature reviews can involve complex ideas and various bodies of literature, it is necessary to be explicit about how the the studies that you cite are connected to each other and are relevant for your own research, and how the ideas introduced are relevant for developing your argument. You can achieve this by using language that clearly indicates your position and strengthens your voice in relation to others'.

In your introduction, you should make it clear what the purpose of the literature review is, as in the following.

Note how the author explains the purpose of the literature review ("The aim of the chapter is to define the kinds of intervention that will have the most beneficial impact"). The author also generally identifies the literature review's key message ("Answers to these questions are found in accounts of both cause and action"). In your own introduction, you could go into more detail about your argument. For example, consider the introduction below, which explains the key points more directly.

To see how other people in your field write literature reviews in a thesis, check out the ANU Digital Thesis Collection to find other theses, and ask your supervisor to show you some past samples.

Within paragraphs, your choice of language can help you to explain connections between the literature's concepts. Take a look at the words in bold in the sample text below, and note how they help the author to guide you through the ideas.

Critically evaluating the literature

A key role of your literature review is to show your critical interpretation and evaluation of the literature. When taking notes and researching, you can develop this critical evaluation by asking yourself questions such as:

• what are the strengths and weaknesses/limitations of the different bodies of literature/studies you are reviewing?
• what accounts for authors' different findings-how can these be explained (e.g. theory or methodology adopted etc.)? (Hold your sources in relation)
• to which issues, gaps, ambiguities, unresolved problems, etc. in the literature do you wish to particularly draw attention and why?
• what are the implications of your discussions? (Don't leave your reader thinking: "This is an interesting piece of critical analysis, but what's the point of it all?" "So what?")

When it comes to writing up your literature review, you can use language to show your critical interpretation and evaluation. For example, take a look at the words in bold in the sample text below. How do they show interpretation and evaluation?

Positioning your research in relation to the literature

It could be that you are expected to reserve detailed discussion of your own research for a distinct section within or following your literature review. More likely though, you will be expected to situate your own research in relation to the literature during the review. The examples below shows how the authors relate their own research to the literature they review. Note how they tell you what they are doing, why they are doing it, where they are going, and where you can find more detailed information within other areas of the thesis.

Literature reviews

Purpose of traditional literature reviews

Placement of traditional literature reviews

Structuring a literature review

Systematic literature reviews

Grounded theory literature reviews

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Original research article, developing literature review writing and citation practices through an online writing tutorial series: corpus-based evidence.

• 1 Department of Linguistics, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, SK, Canada
• 2 Department of Linguistics, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, United States

Writing a literature review (LR) in English can be a daunting task for non-native English-speaking graduate students due to the complexities of this academic genre. To help graduate students raise genre awareness and develop LR writing skills, a five-unit online tutorial series was designed and implemented at a large university in Canada. The tutorial focuses on the following features of the LR genre: logical structure, academic vocabulary, syntax, as well as citation practices. Each tutorial unit includes an interactive e-book with explanations, examples, quizzes, and an individual or collaborative LR writing assignment. Twenty-nine non-native English-speaking graduate students from various institutions participated in the tutorials and completed five writing tasks. This study reports on their developmental trajectories in writing performance in terms of cohesion, lexical features, syntactic features, and citation practices as shown in three individual writing tasks. Corpus-based analyses indicate that noticeable, often non-linear, changes are observed in several features (e.g., use of connectives, range and frequency of academic vocabulary) across the participants' writing samples. Meanwhile, citation analysis shows a steady increase in the use of integral citations in the participants' writing samples, as measured with occurrence by the number of sentences, along with a more diverse use of reporting verbs and hedges in their final writing samples. Pedagogical implications are discussed.

1. Introduction

Well-developed academic writing skills in English are an indispensable prerequisite for academic success of graduate students since these skills are commonly expected in thesis writing and academic publication. Even after passing the entry English language requirements, many non-native English-speaking international students still experience multiple difficulties with academic writing ( Cheng and Fox, 2008 ; Zhang, 2011 ). Most studies of writing address either the contexts of standard English proficiency tests, such as TOEFL ( Riazi, 2016 ), or undergraduate academic writing courses (e.g., Dafouz, 2020 ). By contrast, very little is known about the specifics of writing skills development by graduate students (e.g., Shi and Dong, 2015 ). The available studies are limited in their scope, disciplines, number of participants, ethnic backgrounds ( Cheng, 2007 ), or methods involving opinions rather than actual writing features ( Zhang, 2011 ). To the best of our knowledge, there are no studies that consider the potential of extracurricular tutorials to impact the writing proficiency of graduate students.

Our focus on the genre of “literature review” is motivated by its high frequency among the types of graduate writing assignments across multiple disciplines in Canadian graduate programs ( Shi and Dong, 2015 ). “Literature review” is defined as a survey of “the relevant literature to discuss the state of knowledge or identify gaps in research” ( Shi and Dong, 2015 : 131). Literature review has been one of the challenges faced by graduate students, native and non-native-English speaking ones alike ( Chen et al., 2016 ; Badenhorst, 2018 ). Graduate-level international students often come to Canadian universities unaware of the specific requirements of this genre and experience multiple difficulties with it, such as avoiding plagiarism, building coherent narratives, citation formats, the use of vocabulary, and grammar forms, which impede their academic progress and cause other negative consequences ( Shi and Dong, 2015 ). While various efforts have been made in English for academic purposes (EAP) programs to help graduate students develop academic writing skills and/or genre awareness (e.g., Storch and Tapper, 2009 ; Li et al., 2020 ; Crosthwaite et al., 2021 ), programs or courses dedicated to literature review writing are still sparse and under-investigated in research.

From the theoretical perspective, this study is motivated by exploring the specific linguistic structure and textual parameters associated with successful academic writing in graduate context. In general, the major domains of writing success (or failure) have been reported to include lexis (including academic vocabulary), syntax (at phrasal and sentence levels), cohesion, and citation/referencing conventions ( Biber et al., 2011 ; Mansourizadeh and Ahmad, 2011 ; Mazgutova and Kormos, 2015 ). On the practical side, our project is aimed at identifying a cost-effective way to develop graduate students' writing skills with minimal pressure on the faculty and university resources. In Canada, not all universities can yet provide adequate support for the academic writing needs of international students at the graduate level ( Okuda and Anderson, 2018 ). As a potential solution, we developed an extracurricular writing tutorial series with free access to an online learning platform. In this paper, we are exploring whether the developed tutorial delivers practical outcomes in terms of improving academic writing proficiency in the genre of Literature review.

Our study, therefore, answers a strong demand for additional means of assisting graduate students with their academic writing skills development in the context of Literature review genre. We consider the feasibility and potential benefits of online academic writing tutorials for graduate students' writing performance in terms of linguistic development and citation practices. The materials of the study come from writing samples collected from our online writing tutorial series on literature review writing.

2. Literature review

2.1. learners' development of academic writing.

While we acknowledge the role of “history, ideology, and socio-cultural structures” in writing skills development ( Zhang, 2011 , p. 41), in this particular paper, we treat writing from an “autonomous” perspective of the academic literacies model which sees writing as a development of specific skills and genre repertoires ( Lea and Street, 1998 ). More specifically, we adopt the combination of “the linguistic and genre” approach focusing mostly on linguistic structures and writing within a specific genre ( Xu, 2019 ). For the genre of literature review, it is not surprising to see studies applying genre analysis to graduate students' writing samples ( Flowerdew and Forest, 2011 ) or focusing on writer stances ( Shahsavar and Kourepaz, 2020 ). However, specific linguistic features in this genre, especially by graduate students, have not been extensively researched. When it comes to gauging learners' development of academic writing in general, linguistic measures are often operationalized at various levels such as lexical and syntactic complexities ( Bulté and Housen, 2014 ). At the lexical level, measures of complexity and sophistication have been employed in several empirical studies. For example, in Mazgutova and Kormos (2015) pretest-posttest study, changes in five lexical measures, i.e., two diversity measures, two-word frequency measures, and one semantic similarity measure, were investigated in the argumentative writing samples by two groups of students in a 4-week intensive EAP program. While the two groups enrolled in the same EAP program as two cohorts, it was found that at the end of the program, the L2 students in one group were able to gain significant improvement in all five lexical measures, while the students in the other group showed progress in only one diversity measure (squared verb variation) and a frequency measure of AWL (Academic Word List) words. With their corpus tools named the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication (TAALES), Kyle and Crossley (2015) added a series of new measures (e.g., word or n-gram frequency and range indices with various corpora references, academic vocabulary indices, and word information indices) to represent lexical sophistication, which is also related to lexical diversity and difficulty of lexical items. Through examining the relationships between the lexical sophistication indices yielded by TAALES and the holistic scores of TOEFL writing samples from two writing task types, Kyle and Crossley confirmed that several features were significantly correlated with the writing holistic scores. Nevertheless, task effect in Kyle and Crossley (2015) seemed noticeable as a set of four lexical sophistication features (i.e., all word range and bigram frequency logarithm referenced to BNC written corpus, number of hypernyms, and word information) were able to explain over 30% of the variance in the holistic scores of TOEFL independent writing task, while only two features (e.g., number of noun hypernyms and a genre-based range index) were retained in the final regression model to explain <10% of score variances for the TOEFL integrated writing task. Since TOEFL integrated writing only bears some resemblance to source-based academic writing, it is worth investigating what kind of lexical features may exhibit progressive trends in the genre of literature review as sampled in our online tutorial series.

Lexical features are also closely related to cohesion quality, an important aspect of writing performance. For example, the use of connectives and lexical overlaps across sentences or paragraphs can contribute to local cohesion or global cohesion ( Crossley et al., 2019 ). However, previous studies on L2 student essays have established that cohesion features may have different effects on writing performance, often with local cohesion features, such as sentence-level lexical overlaps and use of conjunctions, associated negatively with writing scores ( Crossley et al., 2016 ). It is less clear whether similar patterns can be observed in literature review samples written by L2 graduate students.

For syntactic features in academic writing, phrasal complexity has attracted much attention because features like various phrasal embedding are found to be more distinctive than clause-level features in academic writing ( Biber et al., 2011 ). This trend was confirmed by Kyle (2016) in a series of analyses with his corpus tool named Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC). One goal of Kyle (2016) was to identify a group of syntactic features that are associated with writing proficiency as measured with TOEFL independent writing tasks. With 13 syntactic features, Kyle's final regression model was able to explain 34.2% of variances of TOEFL holistic scores. Six of the features were phrasal complexity indices (i.e., counts and standard deviation of dependents per nominal, prepositions per non-pronoun nominal, dependents per non-pronoun object of a preposition, counts, and standard deviation of dependents per direct object), contributing to an explanation of 17.1% of variances. In other words, the essays written by high-proficiency test takers are more likely to show higher phrasal complexity strengthened by more dependents for noun phrases that function as objects. The other features included five indices of syntactic sophistication that are related to the association strengths or frequencies of construction, and two clausal complexity indices that conceptualize the counts and types of clausal dependents.

Differences in phrasal complexity have also been noted in comparative studies of the writings of novice writers and expert writers. For example, following Biber et al. (2011) noun phrase development model, Ansarifar et al. (2018) compared the phrasal complexity features in the abstracts of research articles written by Persian L1 graduate students (MA and Ph.D. students) and experts in applied linguistics. Their analysis results indicate that four complex noun phrase features, i.e., nouns as pre-modifiers, -ed participle as post-modifiers, attributive adjectives/nouns as pre-modifiers, and multiple preposition phrases as post-modifiers, were strongly associated with the level of expertise as more experienced writers tended to use highly modified noun phrases.

Somewhat different from the general findings in cross-sectional studies on linguistic complexity, Kyle (2016) longitudinal analyses of two small corpora of English language learners' writing samples show that while some common trends were observed as with those in the cross-proficiency comparison, the learners' progress was mainly manifested in clausal complexity such as mean length of t-units and complex nominals per clause, as well as syntactic sophistication indices such as verb-VAC (verb-argument construction) frequency. These differences may be related to the nature of writing tasks (untimed vs. timed tasks), genres, as well as educational levels of the writers.

2.2. Citation practices in academic writing

Academic writing, especially the section of literature review, by nature, requires citing other studies to make an argument and to engage in academic conversations. Citation practices have been studied from the following perspectives: Citation forms or types, citation functions, and reporting verbs ( Hyland, 1999 ; Swales and Feak, 2012 ).

Citation forms or the surface form of citations are often distinguished as integral and non-integral in-text citations based on whether a cited work functions syntactically as a part of a sentence ( Swales and Feak, 2012 ). Both expertise level and nativeness seem to affect writers' citation practices. For example, Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) noted that at a Malaysian university, the research papers in chemical engineering produced by non-native English-speaking expert writers showed a higher density (normalized frequency per 1,000 words) of citations in each section of the research papers than the papers written by non-native novice writers (students) in the same field (e.g., 23.19 vs. 20.1 citations per 1,000 words in the section of Introduction). In addition, in terms of citation types, non-integral citations constitute the majority of the citations (86.47% in experts' papers and 73.23% in novice writers' papers, respectively). However, expert writers demonstrated a balanced use of the two forms of integral citations, namely, verb-controlling where a cited work is introduced by a verb and naming forms which include a cited work as a part of a noun phrase, whereas novice writers heavily relied on the former. With regard to citation functions, while both writer groups have utilized citations for different purposes, expert writers seemed to have more evenly used four main functions while almost half of the citations in novice writers' papers fulfilled the function of attribution. In a study on 100 source-based papers by first-year university ESL students, Lee et al. (2018) revealed a lower citation density (about 10 citations per 1,000 words) and a more balanced use of integral and non-integral citations (53 vs. 47%). This pattern may be attributed to the design of the first-year writing class at the university, where students may be taught to use both citation forms.

Likewise, the use of reporting verbs may vary across expertise levels as well as disciplines both in terms of frequency and types ( Hyland, 1999 ). In a comparison of a learner corpus of academic essays written by first-year undergraduate students and a reference corpus of published research articles in the same disciplines, Liardét and Black (2019 ) revealed that novice writers on average used fewer reporting verbs than expert writers. This finding is supported by Marti et al. (2019) comparative study on reporting verbs. Furthermore, as shown in Liardét and Black (2019 ), compared to the reporting verbs in learners' essays, a larger proportion of the reporting verbs used by experts are used to convey writers' evaluative stance. Related to stance-making in citations is the use of boosters and hedges. Aull and Lancaster (2014) corpus-based comparative analysis indicates that the frequencies of hedges and boosters were affected by writers' expertise levels. More specifically, first-year university students' argumentative essays tend to use fewer hedges and more boosters than the ones written by upper-level students and experts. It is not clear whether similar patterns can be observed in L2 graduate students' literature reviews.

As discussed above, novice writers, including L2 graduate students, need to pay attention to citation practices for better academic socialization. Nevertheless, only limited studies have focused on L2 learners' development of citation practices in academic writing.

2.3. Research questions

Considering the importance of linguistic performance and citation practices in academic writing, as well as the lack of empirical studies on L2 learners' development of literature review writing, this study aims to answer two research questions in the context of an online tutorial series of literature review writing:

1. What linguistic features may change in L2 graduate students' literature review texts over the course of an online academic writing tutorial series?

2. How do L2 graduate students' citation practices change in terms of citation forms and stance features (reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters) over the course of an online academic writing tutorial series?

3. Research methodology

3.1. the writing tutorial series.

To help address some challenges faced by ESL graduate students in writing literature reviews, we developed a 5-unit online tutorial series with a focus on the following aspects of literature review writing: genre requirements, logic and structure in literature review, sentence structures, academic vocabulary, and grammar of reported speech (see Table 1 ). The selection of the themes was made based on the genre features of literature review ( Flowerdew and Forest, 2011 ) as well as the typical challenges in academic writing ( Chen et al., 2016 ). Each unit consists of a core tutorial explaining key concepts with both positive and negative examples, a writing task with peer review or group writing activity, and supplementary activities such as awareness-raising activities for comprehension check, discussion forum for participants to share writing experiences and ideas, and a wrap-up quiz.

Table 1 . Overall structure of the writing tutorial series.

The tutorial series is delivered via MoodleCloud, a cloud-based learning management system, as self-paced sessions but with fixed due dates for writing tasks. Each core tutorial is presented in the format of H5P (HTML5 Package) interactive e-book (see Figure 1 ), which allows participants to browse the content and complete awareness-raising activities embedded in the e-book. The total duration of the tutorial series is 3.5 months. The writing tasks require the participants to write a literature review on a given topic. The expected length is 700–800 words, excluding the references section. Three out of five writing tasks are to be completed individually with a round of online peer review whereas the other two tasks are collaborative tasks contributed by two to three participants. The individual writing tasks were evenly arranged in this tutorial series, with one at the beginning, one in the middle (Unit 3), and one at the end. Such a distribution allows us to study participants' writing development without direct input from their peers as in collaborative writing tasks. A bibliography on each topic is provided to the participants as a starting point for literature search and synthesis. Since this tutorial series was fully online and primarily managed by a non-teaching administrator, there was no restriction regarding the resources that a participant could access to help prepare the writing tasks. This study focuses on individual writing tasks only to track participants' writing development throughout the online tutorial series.

Figure 1 . Screenshot of H5P interactive e-book in tutorial 1.

3.2. Participants

To reach out to the targeted participants, we disseminated recruitment flyers digitally via university newsletters, online announcement, and emails to university faculty members. We also employed snowball sampling strategy to encourage the registered participants to share the project information with their peers. Despite strong interest from prospective participants, only 29 participants have completed the tutorial series and the corresponding writing tasks, partly due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 20 female participants, seven male participants, and two did not provide gender information. Based on their responses to a background survey, 19 participants were current master's students, four were doctoral students, and six were prospective graduate students without clear education level information. The main study fields of the participants include Linguistics (7), Education (6), Political Science (5), Computer Science (2), Veterinary Science (2), Health Science (2), Humanities (1), Agriculture (1), and Business (1). The first languages of the participants included Chinese (4), Farsi (4), Russian (2), Bengali (2), Hindi (2), Punjabi, Turkish, Vietnamese, Urdu, Spanish, Igbo, Luo, Portuguese, Czech, Jamaican Patois, Lusaka, Arabic, and Ukrainian. The average score of their most recent standardized English language tests is about IELTS 7 or equivalent after a score conversion from other tests, with a range from IELTS 6.5 to 8.5 and a standard deviation of 0.55.

3.3. Data collection and analysis

After a brief online orientation via email, the participants started self-paced study of tutorial content and prepared for the writing task accordingly. The duration of a tutorial unit was 3 weeks when its writing task is designed to be completed individually by the participants. In the case of collaborative writing tasks, participants had 2 weeks to complete the unit (Units 2 and 4). The writing samples were rated by three raters based on a 10-point analytical rating scale at the end of each unit. The rating scale covers ten aspects of the writing quality, such as quality of selected source materials, integration of source materials, overall structure, clarity of ideas, grammatical accuracy, coherence and cohesion, and vocabulary quality. Written feedback, along with the ratings, from the raters was shared with the participants. Considering that the rating practices in this project focused more on written feedback and this paper primarily employed a more corpus-based approach, we chose not to include the ratings in data analyses. The literature reviews written to three individual writing tasks (Tasks 1, 3, and 5) were collected and then processed to retain the body of the literature review only for text analysis (see Table 2 ). Overall, the average length of the writing samples is 733 words. Nevertheless, a possible topic effect is reflected in average essay lengths, with Task 1 ( Online learning: Pros and cons ) elicited relatively longer responses (782 words and 42 sentences on average) and Task 5 (Pacifism, peace-making, just/justifiable war) shorter responses (702 words and 33 sentences on average), while average sentence lengths are mostly comparable across the topics.

Table 2 . Participant writing sample corpus (excluding references sections).

The corpus data were analyzed with three open-source tools developed by Kyle et al. (available at www.linguisticanalysistools.org/ ) for the linguistic features related to text cohesion (Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Cohesion or TAACO 2.0, Crossley et al., 2019 ), syntactic features (Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity or TAASSC 1.3.8, Kyle, 2016 ), and lexical features (Tool for Automatic Analysis of Lexical Sophistication or TAALES 2.2, Kyle and Crossley, 2015 ). While these three analytical tools produce a large number of features or indices, we selected a small portion of the normalized features based on their relevance to the quality of academic writing in general ( Crossley et al., 2016 ; Kyle and Crossley, 2016 , 2017 ). For example, While TAACO yields 194 features in seven categories, such as Type token ratio (TTR) and density, sentence-level lexical overlap, paragraph-level overlap, semantic overlap, connectives, givenness, and source text similarity, four categories are either overlapped with the output from another tool (e.g., TTR from TAALES) or less relevant to the writing genre in this study (e.g., givenness and source text similarity). As a result, only 41 out of 194 features from TAACO in three categories were selected partially based on the findings mentioned in Crossley et al. (2019) . Section 4.1 provides the details of the selected features.

A Python script was developed to automatically extract in-text citation instances for further analyses of citation types (i.e., integral vs. non-integral citations) and to identify reporting verbs, boosters, and hedges used in those instances based on corresponding word lists A list of 122 reporting verbs was prepared based on Liardét and Black (2019) ; a list of 56 hedges and a list of 38 boosters were adapted from Aull and Lancaster (2014) .

Considering the common patterns of non-normal distribution of frequency or ratio-based linguistic features ( McEnery and Hardie, 2012 ), we employed the Friedman test, a non-parametric statistical test, which is similar to repeated measures ANOVA, to compare the selected features across the three individual writing tasks to gauge participants' development in academic writing. Nemenyi post-hoc test was used for pairwise comparisons when a Friedman test detected differences of statistical significance. We understand that using Friedman tests multiple times on the data tends to introduce Type I errors and we decided to choose a more stringent p-value ( p ≤ 0.001) to minimize such influence. Python packages SciPy1.8.1 ( Virtanen et al., 2020 ) and scikit-posthocs ( Terpilowski, 2019 ) were used for statistical analyses.

4.1. Research question 1: Linguistic features

Regarding the lexical features, we narrowed down to nine features that are related to academic writing from the output of the software TAALES: six range or frequency features in content words, bigrams, and trigrams with reference to the academic register in COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), two percentage features related to Academic Word List (AWL) and Academic Formulas List (AFL), and academic lemma TTR (Type-Token Ratio, ratios of unique lemma count to token count). The results of Friedman tests indicate that two features exhibited at least one statistically significant difference among the writing samples from the three tasks (see Table 3 ): frequency of trigrams in COCA Academic (chi-squared = 13.52, p = 0.001, Kendall's W = 0.233) and proportion of AWL (chi-squared = 20.07, p < 0.001, Kendall's W = 0.346). Meanwhile, the differences in other three features were close to statistical significance level: frequency of content words in COCA Academic (chi-squared = 10.21, p = 0.006), bigram range in COCA Academic (chi-squared = 6.69, p = 0.035), proportion of core AFL (chi-squared = 9.93, p = 0.007), and academic lemma TTR (chi-squared = 9.17, p = 0.010).

Table 3 . Lexical features across three writing tasks.

The first feature in Table 3 “COCA academic frequency content words” reflects the level of frequency scores of the content words that appear in the academic register or sub-corpus in COCA, with a higher value suggesting more frequent content words. Follow-up pairwise comparisons confirm that the content word frequency in Task 1 was significantly lower than in Task 3 ( p = 0.023) and Task 5 ( p = 0.011), while no statistically significant difference exists between content word frequency in Tasks 3 and 5. The feature of the bigram range in COCA Academic shows the distribution range of academic bigrams in COCA Academic. A significant difference in this feature is noted between the texts in Tasks 3 and 5 ( p = 0.033), with the latter having a larger value in bigram range. The third COCA Academic-reference feature is the frequency of trigrams. The participants' writing exhibited a decreasing trend in this feature from Task 1 to Task 3 ( p = 0.001), meaning that less frequent trigrams were used in the texts for Task 3. There is no statistically significant difference in this feature between the texts for Tasks 3 and 5.

The texts also differed in the proportions of words from AWL in Task 1 and the other two tasks (Task 1, p = 0.001 and Task 5, p = 0.005), with the texts in Task 1 having a higher proportion of AWL words. For the percentage feature related to AFL, texts in Task 1 had a higher proportion of AFL multi-word units than those in Task 3 ( p = 0.005) while Tasks 3 and 5 had similarly lower proportions. On the other hand, the texts in Task 1 had a lower TTR of academic lemma than those in Task 3 ( p = 0.010), while Tasks 3 and 5 had a similar level of academic lemma TTRs.

For these lexical features, different developmental patterns are observed. Two features (i.e., content words frequency and academic lemma TTR) showed increasing trajectories and two (i.e., trigram frequency and Core AFL percentage) had somewhat downward trends. The other two features remained similar values in Tasks 1 and 5, but differed more remarkably in Task 3.

To explore participants' development of academic writing in terms of text cohesion, we focused on 41 cohesion features in three categories from TAACO, namely, 12 features related to lexical overlaps across sentences, 4 features related to semantic similarity, and 25 connective-related features. These features were compared across the three tasks using the Friedman test. While 14 features were found to be statistically significant at alpha = 0.05 level, only three were retained and reported in Table 4 because some of the features were either highly correlated and/or were extremely low in value. For example, the correlation between the feature word2vec-based semantic similarity across a 2-sentence span and word2vec-based semantic similarity across a 1-sentence span is 0.77, which shows a strong relationship with probably some overlaps in their assessed constructs.

Table 4 . Cohesion features across three writing tasks.

Table 4 shows the mean and standard deviation of the three cohesion features that exhibited noticeable differences across the three writing tasks. The feature “adjacent overlaps of content words” captures local cohesion achieved through repeating content words or lemmas (e.g., lexical verb, noun, adjective) in a target sentence and the following two sentences (chi-squared = 7.103, p = 0.029). A higher value suggests more occurrences of repeated content words (lemmas) divided by type count in the same text. Nemenyi post-hoc tests for pairwise comparison indicate a significant difference in this feature between Task 1 and Task 5 ( p = 0.023), with texts for Task 5 showing a lower level of adjacent overlaps in content words but a larger standard deviation.

Different from the lemma overlap-based measure of cohesion, most semantic similarity measures in TAACO take advantage of statistical representation of word meanings as used in latent semantic analysis or LSA, latent Dirichlet allocation or LDA, and word2vec, respectively to numerically evaluate the semantic distance between text blobs. In this study, the difference in the word2vec-based semantic similarity across a 2-sentence span shows statistical significance across the three tasks (chi-squared = 43.655, p < 0.001, Kendall's W = 0.753). The follow-up pairwise comparisons confirm that the texts for Task 5 exhibited stronger semantic similarity than the ones written for Task 1 ( p = 0.001) and Task 3 ( p = 0.001). The use of basic connectives (e.g., for, and, nor ) also distinguishes the writing samples (chi-squared = 7.103, p = 0.029) to some extent with more basic connectives used in the Task 5 texts than in the Task 1 texts ( p = 0.023) and no significant difference between Task 1 and Task 3.

Overall, the patterns of cohesion features observed in this study suggest that the participants developed better local cohesion through the use of connectives and also by higher sentence-level semantic similarity, but with fewer incidences of repetition of content words across sentences.

From the output of TAALES for syntactic feature analysis, we started with 25 distinguishing features that are relevant to academic writing, including 20 noun phrase complexity features and five clause-complexity features. Four features showed statistically significant differences across the three writing tasks (see Table 5 ).

Table 5 . Syntactic features of statistical significance across three writing tasks.

The feature “average number of dependents per nominal phrase” saw a decreasing trend from Task 1 to Task 5 (chi-squared = 13.24, p = 0.001, Kendall's W = 0.228), with the texts for Task 1 being significantly higher in this feature than those for the other two tasks ( p = 0.005, p = 0.005). For this noun-phrase complexity feature, the dependents could be modifiers fulfilled by an adjective, noun, clause, and preposition phrase. The other three distinguishing features belong to clause-complexity: number of clausal complements per clause (chi-squared = 6.90, p = 0.032), coordinate phrases per clause (chi-squared = 6.28, p = 0.043), and complexity nominal per clause (chi-squared = 7.66, p = 0.022). For the last two clause complexity features, the main difference in the ratio of coordinate phrases per clause exists between Tasks 1 and 3 only ( p = 0.066). The difference in complex nominal per clause between Tasks 1 and 5 is statistically significant ( p = 0.016).

Overall, two of the significant features showed some decrease in both phrasal complexity and clausal complexity in the final writing task. The other two features exhibit a drip and a peak in Task 3, respectively. In other words, the development of syntactic features is not linear as shown in the writing samples.

4.2. Research question 2: Citation practices

The second question concerns participants' citation practices in terms of citation types and stance features in citation instances. Table 6 presents the descriptive statistics of both raw counts and normalized counts of integral and non-integral citations used by the participants in three writing tasks. The results of the Friedman tests indicate that there are no statistically significant differences in citation types across the three tasks. Overall, non-integral citations were dominant in participants' writing in this study. For example, the average raw count of non-integral citation is about 11 whereas that of integral citations is close to 2. The normalized counts of citation types also show similar trends. Similar to the distribution pattern of some linguistic features discussed above, the texts for Task 3 had higher raw counts of citation instances, compared to the other two tasks. This again points to the possible topic effect on writing performance.

Table 6 . Citation practices across three writing tasks.

As for the stances in citation instances, there were no statistically significant differences in the frequencies of occurrence of reporting verbs, boosters, and hedges across the writing tasks while increasing trends are evident for these features, especially the normalized frequencies (see Table 7 ). For example, the texts written for Task 5 employed slightly more reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters than the first two individual writing tasks.

Table 7 . Reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters in citation instances across three writing tasks.

A closer look at the specific instances of reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters reveals that all three features have noticeable differences in their type-token ratios or TTR, especially from Task 1 to the other tasks. For example, in Task 1, a total of 93 unique reporting verbs appeared in the texts. With many of the reporting verbs repeated in the texts, the count of reporting verbs is 225. Therefore, the TTR of reporting verbs in the Task 1 texts is 0.41 (93 types/225 tokens). By contrast, the TTRs for Task 3 and Task 5 are 0.48 (119/246) and 0.46 (118/255), respectively, suggesting higher diversity in participants' use of reporting verbs along with more frequent use of reporting verbs. Likewise, the TTR of hedges increases from Task 1 (24/257, 0.093) to Task 3 (30/313, 0.096) and Task 5 (29/223, 0.130). For the specific cases of boosters, the texts in Task 1 have a TTR of 0.24 (17/79), whereas Tasks 3 and 5 saw higher frequencies of occurrence of boosters (111 and 110, respectively) but with the same count of types (20) and therefore lower TTR values (0.18). This is mainly because of the relatively small list of boosters (38) used in this study for booster extraction. Since we only calculated the TTRs of these features at task level to explore possible differences, we did not run inferential statistics.

Table 8 lists the top 10 words in each category across three writing tasks. Each category shares several common items across three writing tasks with some minor differences emerging. For example, “suggest”, “conduct”, “demonstrate”, and “identify” are unique among the top 10 reporting verbs in Task 1. While it is difficult to pinpoint possible causes of these differences, we speculate that they may be linked to the topic effects as the sources cited for different topics may differ in terms of perceived certainty and acceptance of findings, which in turn may affect writers' stance-making decisions.

Table 8 . Top 10 reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters in citation instances across three writing tasks.

5. Discussions and conclusions

As shown above, the development of literature review writing was not clear-cut over the course of the online tutorial series. On the one hand, participants' writing displays progress in local cohesion quality and some academic lexical features from the first individual task to the last one (Task 5). However, their writing samples also see some decreases in syntactic features and some academic lexical features, which can be an indication of the participants' adjustment of sentence variety in response to one of the most frequent comments from raters on long sentences and the grammatical issues found in them. The participants' citation practices remained at similar levels in terms of citation types and stances manifested through reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters. However, they seem to have more stance-making resources at their disposal as evidenced by more types of reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters. It should be noted that the increase or decrease in values does not necessarily suggest improvement in academic writing yet. These observations are to be discussed in light of the relevant literature.

5.1. Linguistic features

If we consider the complex nature of language learning in general, the diverse patterns in the changes of linguistic features from Task 1 to Task 5 are less surprising as linear progressions in academic writing are rarely achieved. For example, in a longitudinal case study of an L2 graduate student at an Australian university, Rosmawati (2014) tracked the development of complexity and accuracy in the student's argumentative essays over a semester. It was found that a high level of variability existed for both complexity and accuracy development, supporting the non-linear and dynamic nature of L2 learning. Furthermore, a clear difference in the interactions between complexity and accuracy measures was revealed at different measurement points or stages in the semester.

Non-linear patterns are obvious with the lexical features reported in this study as three out of six features (i.e., COCA Academic-based bigram range, COCA Academic-based trigram frequency, and percentage of core AFL units) showed a U-shaped development. In other words, the literature reviews written on the third topic (“Online learning: Pros and cons”) had lower values in these three features. Compared with the other two topics (i.e., legalization of marijuana and pacifism), online learning is a relatively familiar topic to the L2 graduate students, especially for those who have experienced online learning during the COVID pandemic. This may be the reason that the participants did not use the bigrams of higher range value (that is, the bigrams used more widely in COCA's academic register) or trigrams of higher frequency value (that is, the trigrams appearing more frequently). Likewise, the L2 graduate students may have incorporated their personal experiences in this literature review, which may reduce the need to use the units from AFL (academic Formulas List). Interestingly, the literature reviews on Topic 3 had a higher percentage of words from AWL. This may be accounted for by the fact that the topic itself is academic and common academic vocabulary is expected.

Overall, three lexical features (i.e., content word frequency, bigram range, academic lemma TTR) showed higher values in the last writing task, suggesting some improvement in the use of academic vocabulary at the end of the tutorial series. While these features are different from the ones as strong predictors of TOEFL writing performance in Kyle and Crossley (2015) , the features share some basic characteristics, such as range and frequency indices with different reference corpora (COCA Academic in this study vs. BNC written in Kyle and Crossley (2015) . The increase in academic lemma TTR is roughly in line with the findings in Mazgutova and Kormos (2015) in which TTR-based measures improved at the end of a 4-week writing program.

As for the cohesion features, the retained distinguishing ones (i.e., content word overlaps in adjacent two sentences, word2vec-based similarity across two sentences, and use of basic connectives) in this study highlight the notable changes in local cohesion across the three writing tasks. These features are not necessarily specific to the genre of literature reviews, though, or reflect improvement in academic writing made by the L2 graduate students. Compared to the findings in the studies that used the same or similar measures, these three cohesion features have not been reported as major predictors of writing performance yet. In Crossley et al. (2016) study of descriptive essays written by L2 university students in EAP courses, they identified 32 cohesion features that were significantly correlated to students' essay scores. Nevertheless, some of the relevant cohesion features were found to be significantly correlated with essay scores in Crossley et al. (2016) , for example, adjacent overlaps of words in general across two sentences ( r = 0.32), LSA-based similarity from initial to middle paragraphs ( r = 0.23), and use of conjunctions ( r = 0.24). Therefore, we may speculate that the increase in these cohesive features may be related to the content of the online tutorials, specifically the ones about academic vocabulary and sentence structures, thus contributing positively to writing performance.

The syntactic features also showed some unexpected patterns as all four features ended up with smaller values in the last writing task. This suggests that L2 graduate students' writing became less complex syntactically at both phrasal and clausal levels, likely as a result of addressing raters' comments on long and complex sentences found in previous writing tasks. For example, the last literature reviews appeared to have fewer dependents per nominal structure, fewer clausal complements, coordinate phrases, and complex nominals per clause. Since previous studies have established positive correlations between syntactic complexity features and writing performance ( Kyle, 2016 ), we may suppose that with a relatively abstract topic (i.e., pacifism), the last literature review task may have presented some challenges to L2 graduate students who may be less able to manage syntactic structures at the expense of other writing aspects such as topic familiarity. While it is difficult to be certain about the causes of the decreases, it is equally important to keep in mind that the majority of the syntactic features (21 out of 25) examined did not have statistically significant changes across the three writing tasks. It appears that the L2 graduate students have reached a relatively stable level of syntactic development and only a handful of features fluctuated in their writing samples.

5.2. Citation practices

In terms of the frequency of citations, the literature reviews written by the L2 graduate students have fewer normalized counts of citation instances or lower citation density, compared to the citation counts in the Introduction sections of chemical engineering papers reported in Mansourizadeh and Ahmad (2011) . Meanwhile, similar to the dominant use of non-integral citations found in both expert papers and novice papers in their study, the writing samples in this study also showed a strong preference for non-integral citations (85.1 to 89.1% of raw citation counts). However, it is worth mentioning that disciplinary differences in preferred citation forms exist ( Hu and Wang, 2014 ). For example, Hu and Wang noted that published research articles in applied linguistics tend to have a more balanced distribution of integral and non-integral citations, compared to the articles in general medicine. Lillis et al. (2010) reported higher proportions of non-integral citations (over 70%) in the research articles in psychology. Considering that the topics in our study have an orientation toward social science or humanities, we may expect to see a somewhat balanced use of both citation forms as well. It requires further inquiry to understand why the L2 graduate students in this study chose to use more non-integral citations as several factors may affect a writer's preference for citation forms. In a quantitative analysis of the relationships among individual factors and citation competence, Ma and Qin (2017) reported that cognitive proficiency in source use (operationalized as knowledge of source use and ability to detect plagiarism) can significantly influence English major students' citation competence as measured with intertextual strategies, writers' stance, citation typology, and citation function in a read-to-write task. Meanwhile, students' academic reading proficiency exerted a direct impact on citation competence.

Regarding the use of reporting verbs, hedges, and boosters in the citation instances, our study shows a steady, but not statistically significant, increase in these stance-making features. More importantly, the TTRs of these lexical items increased as well, showing that the L2 graduate students may have become more aware of stance-making with these items at the end of the tutorial series. As discussed above, this progress was also related to the student's development of academic vocabulary, likely from the benefit of the tutorials on genre requirements and sentence structures. Since the changes in these features were not statistically significant, these phenomena should be interpreted with caution.

6. Implications and future studies

Before discussing the pedagogical implications of the findings, we need to point out the limitations of this study. Firstly, this study focuses on the written output of the online tutorial series. More qualitative input from the L2 graduate students as well as the instructors (e.g., feedback and scores) would supplement the quantitative analysis and facilitate the understanding of students' development of academic writing. In addition, the tutorial series has a fixed number of topics for the participants. Even with the provided bibliographies, topic familiarity may still influence the writer's performance and writing motivation. To avoid this potential issue, future studies may consider collecting writing samples from graduate students' work either from course assignments or their research projects. Lastly, for this purely online tutorial series open to voluntary participation during the pandemic, it was challenging to recruit more participants and several participants were not able to complete the whole series. Consequently, with a small sample size, the diversity in participants' background and educational level may impact the generalizability of the findings. Future projects with similar materials design may consider a hybrid mode with in-person consultation opportunities to better attract and support participants.

The format and content of the online tutorial may be useful for EAP practitioners and researchers. The materials in the tutorial series were prepared with specific aspects of literature review writing in mind, covering both genre features (e.g., logic and structure) and linguistic features (e.g., academic vocabulary, sentence structure, and reported speech). These materials can be used to supplement EAP teaching. In addition, the interactive e-book and accompanying activities used in this series are made to be open-access resources. Other researchers and EAP instructors may use some of the content and activities directly from this tutorial series, with or without modifications. At the same time, the quantified linguistic features generated by the software provided rich information regarding graduate students' writing development as well as tutorial performance. These analytical tools are free and user-friendly. With basic training, practitioners may be able to gain more insight into graduate students' writing. Furthermore, the decrease in some syntactic features, along with the lack of changes in many other linguistic features, deserves some attention. These trends may be a result of missing or under-represented components in the tutorial series. For example, discipline-specific activities on the rhetorical functions of citation and roles of citation types can be added or expanded so that L2 graduate students can better understand the expectations of citation practices in their fields. In addition, more example structures of appropriate phrasal and clausal complexity levels can be incorporated into the tutorial on “sentence structures.” For the features that did vary across the writing tasks, it would be beneficial to identify the ones that are associated positively with academic writing performance so that corresponding activities can be developed to raise students' awareness of those important features.

While the developmental patterns vary across the targeted linguistic features and citation practices, the largely positive findings of this corpus-based study (i.e., progress in cohesion and academic vocabulary) are very promising for a standalone online tutorial series that requires limited interventions from instructors.

Data availability statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation.

Ethics statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by Research Office, University of Saskatchewan. Written informed consent for participation was not required for this study in accordance with the national legislation and the institutional requirements.

Author contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

This project is funded by the Insight Development Grants (430-2020-00179) from Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank SSHRC for supporting this project.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher's note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2023.1035394/full#supplementary-material

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Keywords: literature review writing, ESL graduate students, online tutorials, corpus-based analysis, linguistic complexity, citation practices, reporting verbs

Citation: Li Z, Makarova V and Wang Z (2023) Developing literature review writing and citation practices through an online writing tutorial series: Corpus-based evidence. Front. Commun. 8:1035394. doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2023.1035394

Received: 02 September 2022; Accepted: 10 February 2023; Published: 02 March 2023.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2023 Li, Makarova and Wang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Zhi Li, z.li@usask.ca

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Academic Phrases for Writing Results & Discussion Sections of a Research Paper

Overview |   Abstract   | Introduction | Literature Review | Materials & Methods | Results & Discussion | Conclusion & Future Work | Acknowledgements & Appendix

The results and discussion sections are one of the challenging sections to write. It is important to plan this section carefully as it may contain a large amount of scientific data that needs to be presented in a clear and concise fashion. The purpose of a Results section is to present the key results of your research. Results and discussions can either be combined into one section or organized as separate sections depending on the requirements of the journal to which you are submitting your research paper. Use subsections and subheadings to improve readability and clarity. Number all tables and figures with descriptive titles. Present your results as figures and tables and point the reader to relevant items while discussing the results. This section should highlight significant or interesting findings along with P values for statistical tests. Be sure to include negative results and highlight potential limitations of the paper. You will be criticised by the reviewers if you don’t discuss the shortcomings of your research. This often makes up for a great discussion section, so do not be afraid to highlight them.

The results and discussion section of your research paper should include the following:

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• Casual arguments
• Speculations
• Deductive arguments

1. Findings

From the short review above, key findings emerge: __ We describe the results of __, which show __ This suggests that __ We showed that __ Our findings on __ at least hint that __ This is an important finding in the understanding of the __ The present study confirmed the findings about __ Another promising finding was that __ Our results demonstrated that __ This result highlights that little is known about the __ A further novel finding is that __ Together, the present findings confirm __ The implications of these findings are discussed in __ The results demonstrate two things.  First, __. Second,  __ The results of the experiment found clear support for the __ This analysis found evidence for __ Planned comparisons revealed that __ Our results casts a new light on __ This section summarises the findings and contributions made. It performs well, giving good results. This gives clearly better results than __ The results confirm that this a good choice for __ From the results, it is clear that __ In this section, we will illustrate some experimental results. This delivers significantly better results due to __ The result now provides evidence to __ It leads to good results, even if the improvement is negligible. This yields increasingly good results on data. The result of this analysis is then compared with the  __ The applicability of these new results are then tested on __ This is important to correctly interpret the results. The results are substantially better than __ The results lead to similar conclusion where __ Superior results are seen for __ From these results it is clear that __ Extensive results carried out show that this method improves __ We obtain good results with this simple method. However, even better results are achieved when using our algorithm. It is worth discussing these interesting facts revealed by the results of  __ Overall, our method was the one that obtained the most robust results. Slightly superior results are achieved with our algorithm. The result is equal to or better than a result that is currently accepted.

2. Comparison with prior studies

The results demonstrated in this chapter match state of the art methods. Here we compare the results of the proposed method with those of the traditional methods. These results go beyond previous reports, showing that __ In line with previous studies __ This result ties well with previous studies wherein __ Contrary to the findings of __ we did not find __ They have demonstrated that __ Others have shown that __ improves __ By comparing the results from __, we hope to determine __ However, in line with the ideas of __, it can be concluded that __ When comparing our results to those of older studies, it must be pointed out that __ We have verified that using __ produces similar results Overall these findings are in accordance with findings reported by __ Even though we did not replicate the previously reported __, our results suggest that __ A similar conclusion was reached by __ However, when comparing our results to those of older studies, it must be pointed out __ This is consistent with what has been found in previous __ A similar pattern of results was obtained in __ The findings are directly in line with previous findings These basic findings are consistent with research showing that __ Other results were broadly in line with __

3. Limitations of your work

Because of the lack of __ we decided to not investigate __ One concern about the findings of __ was that __ Because of this potential limitation, we treat __ The limitations of the present studies naturally include __ Regarding the limitations of __, it could be argued that __ Another limitation of this __ This limitation is apparent in many __ Another limitation in __ involves the issue of __ The main limitation is the lack of __ One limitation is found in this case. One limitation of these methods however is that they __ It presents some limitations such as __ Although widely accepted, it suffers from some limitations due to __ An apparent limitation of the method is __ There are several limitations to this approach. One limitation of our implementation is that it is __ A major source of limitation is due to  __ The approach utilised suffers from the limitation that __ The limitations are becoming clear __ It suffers from the same limitations associated with a __

4. Casual arguments

A popular explanation of __ is that __ It is by now generally accepted that __ A popular explanation is that __ As it is not generally agreed that __ These are very small and difficult to observe. It is important to highlight the fact that __ It is notable that __ An important question associated with __ is __ This did not impair the __ This is important because there is __ This implies that __ is associated with __ This is indicative for lack of __ This will not be biased by __ There were also some important differences in __ It is interesting to note that, __ It is unlikely that __ This may alter or improve aspects of __ In contrast, this makes it possible to __ This is particularly important when investigating __ This has been used to successfully account for __ This introduces a possible confound in __ This was included to verify that __

5. Speculations

However, we acknowledge that there are considerable discussions among researchers as to __ We speculate that this might be due to __ There are reasons to doubt this explanation of __ It remains unclear to which degree __ are attributed to __ However, __ does seem to improve __ This does seem to depend on __ It is important to note, that the present evidence relies on __ The results show that __ does not seem to impact the __ However, the extent to which it is possible to __ is unknown Alternatively, it could simply mean that __ It is difficult to explain such results within the context of __ It is unclear whether this is a suitable for __ This appears to be a case of __ From this standpoint, __ can be considered as __ To date, __remain unknown Under certain assumptions, this can be construed as __ Because of this potential limitation, we treat __ In addition, several questions remain unanswered. At this stage of understanding, we believe__ Therefore, it remains unclear whether __ This may explain why __

6. Deductive arguments

A difference between these __ can only be attributable to __ Nonetheless, we believe that it is well justified to __ This may raise concerns about __ which can be addressed by __ As discussed, this is due to the fact that __ Results demonstrate that this is not necessarily true. These findings support the notion that __ is not influenced by __ This may be the reason why we did not find __ In order to test whether this is equivalent across __, we __ Therefore, __ can be considered to be equivalent for __

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Theoretical trends of research on technology and L2 vocabulary learning: A systematic review

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• Xinyuan Yang   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-4632-0822 1 ,
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Vocabulary development is critical for second language (L2) learners in both English as a Second Language (ESL) and English as a Foreign Language (EFL) contexts. Recently, a large body of research has been dedicated to how computer-assisted language learning (CALL) and mobile-assisted language learning (MALL) can facilitate vocabulary knowledge in L2 learners in both EFL and ESL settings. A number of reviews on this topic have been conducted, however, little attention has been given to learners in PreK-12. Also missing from the existing research is an in-depth examination of the theories underlying vocabulary learning within technological programs. However, understanding theoretical foundations of vocabulary learning is critical for both researchers and educators who seek to improve vocabulary development in L2 learners. The current study aims to close these gaps by investigating research on the use of technology for L2 vocabulary learning for learners in PreK-12 between 2011 and 2020. Using systematic review procedures, a total of 80 articles were identified for analysis. Results showed information/cognitive theories were most frequently and explicitly referenced, followed by social theories of learning. Consistent with previous research syntheses on CALL and MALL, many studies did not articulate an explicit theoretical framework used in their research. These findings suggest that research on technology-mediated vocabulary learning for Prek-12 L2 learners should be conducted from more diverse and explicit theoretical perspectives.

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Yang, X., Kuo, LJ., Eslami, Z.R. et al. Theoretical trends of research on technology and L2 vocabulary learning: A systematic review. J. Comput. Educ. 8 , 465–483 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40692-021-00187-8

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Memorization strategy and foreign language learning: a narrative literature review

Memorization strategy as a subset of language learning strategy (LLS) has long been investigated to explain foreign language learners’ learning behaviors and uncover the role that it plays in foreign language learning (FLL). In the past half century, the focus of memorization research in FLL has been shifted from Memorization, Vocabulary Memorization to Text Memorization, which are termed with consideration of the length of language material to memorize. Since memorization strategy use is greatly influenced by varieties of psychological and socio-culture variables, the memorization strategy system becomes more complicated in the process of FLL. The present narrative review attempts to provide an overview of memorization strategy research in the field of FLL by discussing the concepts, categorizations, uses, instructions and influential factors of the three types of memorization strategies. By reviewing the existing studies, this paper proposes that in future research, diversified methods be deployed with the expansion of research perspectives and the enrichment of research topics to reveal the relationship between memorization strategy and FLL more extensively.

1. Introduction

Learning strategy is perceived as one of the influential factors relating to learner’s learning outcomes. In the field of FLL, particularly learning English as foreign language (EFL), efforts have been made in the previous research to explore the relationship between LLS and FLL with a systematic identification of varieties of strategies that EFL leaners deploy in the process of language learning ( O’Malley and Chamot, 1990 ; Macaro, 2001 ; Oxford, 2017 ; Chamot and Harris, 2019 ). Among different groups of LLSs, memorization, memorization strategy, or memory strategy, has been valued since it is considered as the initial step in learning a language in a non-native language speaking context.

With the introduction of cognitive theory to FLL, memorization is treated as a part of the cognitive learning process. A number of studies have been focused on the classification of memorization with discovery of specific memorization strategies employed by foreign language learners and their contributions to FLL. With the expansion of the scope of LLS into investigations of strategies in relation to specific language skills, due attention, in further studies, has been paid to associate memorization with language skill areas, such as speaking and writing ( He and Shi, 2008 ; Chen et al., 2016 ). In these studies, memorization refers to the strategies to commit the language material, short or long, to memory with little consideration of its length. However, some scholars find that many of these strategies are closely associated with vocabulary learning ( Takač, 2008 ; Gu, 2010 ; Sinhaneti and Kyaw, 2012 ). Afterwards, vocabulary memorization strategy or memorization as vocabulary learning strategy starts to be used as a more concrete and specialized terminology to describe the strategies to memorize words, the smaller language units. A number of studies have been conducted to explore the relevant issues like vocabulary memorization strategy use and instruction. Rather than being focused on the impact of memorization and vocabulary memorization on FLL, the more recent research has shed light on text memorization, suggesting a conspicuous division between the concept of vocabulary memorization strategy and text memorization strategy in the hope of uncovering how EFL learners treat the long and consecutive texts in the process of memorization to facilitate their language learning ( Harris, 2015 ; Yu, 2017 ; Wang, 2023 ). Therefore, memorization strategy can be historically sorted into three types, namely memorization, vocabulary memorization and text memorization, when the length of language material for memorization is considered.

Narrative literature review can present a comprehensive background for a particular topic by synthesizing a broad spectrum of the literature into a coherent interpretation that highlights the major issues, trends, complexities, and controversies that are at the center of it ( Efron and Ruth, 2019 ). Together with consideration of the longstanding history of memorization research, narrative literature review is adopted in this paper. Only published scientific research articles that are written in English and relevant to memorization, vocabulary memorization and text memorization in the field of FLL are considered for the review. Conference and review papers are not included. The present narrative review aims to go through the studies concerning the three types of memorization strategies and their relationships with FLL, summarize the development and major findings in the past half century and offer directions for future research on memorization as a foreign LLS.

2. Memorization in FLL

2.1. concept of memorization.

Memorization strategy, historically named mnemonics, is also termed memory strategy or simply memorization in the existing literature. Oxford (1990) defines it as strategies that help learners store and retrieve new information. Since it is a fundamental part of the learning process with involvement of storage and retrieval of what has been learned, the value of memorization, as one consequential subcategory of LLS, can be prominently seen in the definitions of learning strategy by many researchers. The role of memorization is portrayed in an early definition by Dansereau (1985) , who regards learning strategy as the operations that leaners deploy for acquisition, storage , retrieval, or use of information and intentional behavior. Richards and Platt (1992) refer to memorization as thoughts used by learners during learning to better help understand, learn or remember new information. “Storage” and “remember” can be taken as the synonyms of memorization in a broad sense, or at least the similar concept in meaning that highlights the information input in the cognitive process in learning. With the introduction and extensive application of cognitive theory into FLL, the significance of memorization in language learning is identified by defining foreign LLS as strategies that help learners take in various aspects of the language, store them in long-term memory , and use them when needed ( Okada et al., 1996 ) and teachable actions that learners choose from among alternatives and employ for L2 learning purposes, e.g., constructing, internalizing, storing , retrieving, and using information ( Oxford, 2011 ). Likewise, Cohen (2014) correlates memorization with LLS for formally committing to memory whatever material is not acquired naturally through exposure. Though some views on memory strategy are not positive, memory-related words, such as “remember” and “store” with other linguistic forms like “storage” and “storing,” are employed to describe and define learning strategy or LLS. To foreign language learners, for instance, EFL learners, as they are not able to gain many opportunities to be exposed to an English-speaking environment, memorization strategy can be a useful aid in the learning process to a large extent. So the significance of memorization as a part of the cognitive process in FLL is evident.

2.2. Classification of memorization

Though language scholars hold different views on the categorization of LLS, many of them have highlighted the importance of memorization as a foreign LLS when groups of sub-memorization strategies facilitating language learning are investigated. Rubin (1981) notes that storage and retrieval of information are involved in language learning, so memorization, by which language materials are stored, stays a vital part. As a basic subset of strategies that directly affect learning, such strategies as to take note, pronounce out loud, find association and use mechanical devices appear in his memorization strategy list. The most outstanding contribution to the classification of memorization is made by Oxford (1990) , stressing that memory strategy is a mighty mental tool for learners to not only store but retrieve language information. In detail, it is composed of four categories: creating mental linkages, applying images and sounds, reviewing well, and employing actions, which are further divided into 10 subsets. Though Cohen (2014) does not make a clear-cut classification of memory strategies, all the subsets of language learning strategies presented by him, including strategies for identifying, distinguishing, grouping and contacting repeatedly with learning materials, seem to contribute to memorizing the language materials that are not acquired by natural exposure. In fact, the memorization classification is accompanied with the taxonomy of LLS as a result of the enquires into how language learners process, store, and retrieve language learning materials. No matter how memorization strategy is classified, as a powerful mental instrument for storage and retrieval of language information, the role of memorization in the language learning process can never be overlooked.

2.3. Memorization and understanding

The endeavor to investigate information processing in cognitive psychology leads to the recognition of memorization as a fundamental learning strategy in the learning process. A number of studies, not excluding the ones in the field of FLL, reveal that the adoption of memorization strategy is beneficial to enhance learning ( Kember, 1996 ; Hulstijn, 2000 ; Alieh and Atefeh, 2015 ). But for years, memorization has been regarded as being mechanic and a barrier to prevent creativity in learning, so such strategy is not encouraged and receives criticism particularly in western settings. However, the fact that those with Asian backgrounds, such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, become successful learners by heavy reliance on memorization prompts scholars to uncover the paradox ( Mok et al., 2001 ; Chan and Rao, 2009 ). Researchers suggest the variation between rote memorization and meaningful memorization which consists of two forms: understanding followed by memorization; memorization and understanding work simultaneously ( Marton et al., 1996 ). This finding is echoed by Mugler and Landbeck (2000) who classify memorization into two groups: rote learning that implies a lack of understanding, and memorization that implies understanding. On the basis of the sequential order of understanding and memorization, three models are unfolded: memorization, then understanding; understanding, then memorization; combination of both. These are termed, respectively, by Marton et al. (2005) rote memorization, in which memorization precedes understanding, meaningful memorization 1, in which memorization succeeds understanding, and meaningful memorization 2, in which memorization and understanding are combined to facilitate leaning at the same time. A similar finding that memorization does not function alone, but works with understanding in the Asian learners’ learning process is obtained in a case study involving 21 Chinese students studying in UK ( Mathias et al., 2013 ). In other studies, the distinction between good memorization and bad memorization is proposed with opposition to bad memorization use because it is good memorization with understanding that helps internalize what has been learned. ( Oanh and Hien, 2006 ; Khamees, 2016 ). To conclude, memorization does not necessarily mean rote learning that is traditionally defined as mechanical learning only by repetition. When understanding is engaged in the process of memorization, memorization strategy can be ultimately positive and advantageous to language learning.

2.4. Memorization use and instruction

Since language learners are not often rote or passive learners when meaningful or good memorization strategy is applied, many researchers find that memorization has positive effects on language learning ( Li, 2012 ; Hashim, 2015 ). In many studies ( Hong-Nam and Leavell, 2007 ; Sung, 2011 ; Ranjan et al., 2021 ), the role that memorization plays in FFL is investigated by using Oxford’s Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) or other questionnaires concerning memorization use. For example, by application of SILL, together with a semi-structured interview, an open-ended questionnaire and the respondents’ online interactions in a language task, the study by Shakarami et al. (2011) finds that the Malaysian Net-Generation frequently uses memorization strategy with a proposal to re-conceptualize the notion of memorization strategy in SILL to cope with learner’s needs. In another study ( Khamees, 2016 ), a questionnaire is administrated to 66 FLL learners to uncover which language aspect is most frequently memorized and the reasons for memorization strategy use. The findings suggest that memorization facilitates language learning and improve learners’ confidence, but its use is among some limited areas of language, such as vocabulary, term definitions and literary extracts. In addition, it is pointed out that rote memorization needs to be avoided.

With the discovery of the favorable impact that memorization imposes on FLL, how the specific memorization strategies can be applied to the areas of foreign language skills also arouses researchers’ interest. Oxford (1990) demonstrates how each of the ten subsets of memory strategies helps develop language learners’ four language skills (listening, reading, speaking and writing) with a focus on elaboration of storage function of each memory strategy. In a questionnaire-based study, Ozkan and Kesen (2008) make a comparison between memorization use in speaking and writing, reporting that both freshmen and seniors tend to employ memorization to improve their writing and speaking skills, but do it more often in writing than speaking. A research with an experimental group and a control group is conducted by Chen et al. (2016) to explore the effects of memorization use on improvement of EFL learners’ oral English proficiency. The findings indicate a significant difference in learners’ speaking accuracy and fluency. The experimental group who acquires memorization by class instructions performs better than the controlled group with no instructions.

One study, conducted by He and Shi (2008) with an attempt to make inquiries about the performances of 16 interviewed Chinese students studying at a Canadian university in two English writing tests, is worthy to be underscored. In the study, many Chinese participants pass Test of Written English, an entrance writing test for ESL/EFL learners, by dependence on memorization of the writing samples, but fail in English Language Proficiency Index (LPI) for both ESL/EFL learners and some native speakers. Many of them attribute their success to the pre-test training focused on memorization in China and complain LPI training course centered on developing writing skills in Canada. Thus, sociocultural factor beyond LLS itself, is involved in language learning, so memorization use becomes a culture-related issue. As an individual difference, memorization can be more likely individualized and affected by cultural and social factors. So, it is necessary and of significance to consider other individual differences when memorization is investigated.

3. Vocabulary memorization in FLL

3.1. concept of vocabulary memorization.

The original intention of studies on memorization by psycholinguists and applied linguists is to inquire into the strategies that language learners deploy to memorize words, formulaic sequences (FSs), frequently-used simple sentences, basic sentence patterns, dialogues or monologues to ameliorate language learning ( Rubin, 1981 ). The materials for memorization include both short and long language units, so the term “memorization” in the early studies is used in a boarder sense and seems to be more general. Many subgroups of memorization strategy concluded in the early memorization list, such as note-taking, associations, keyword, structured-reviewing etc. ( Cohen and Aphek, 1980 ; Pressley et al., 1982 ; O’Malley and Chamot, 1985 ; Oxford, 1990 ) are recognized as strategies that work mostly to memorize vocabulary, the smaller lexical items. With scholars’ increasing interest on vocabulary learning strategy, this issue is later noticed and leads to the use of a more accurate terminology to refer to the strategies to memorize vocabulary. However, an agreement on the terminology has not been reached since varieties of terms are being used, such as vocabulary memorization strategy, memorization as a vocabulary learning strategy, memory strategy for vocabulary learning etc. Among them, vocabulary memorization is used in the present review and suggested to be used in the future research because of its simplicity and clarity.

3.2. Vocabulary memorization as a subset of vocabulary learning strategy

Similar to studies on general memorization discovered with the taxonomies of LLS, the research on vocabulary memorization develops with the categorization of vocabulary learning strategy. Vocabulary learning strategy is firstly put forward by Stoffer (1995) , which consists of 9 groups based on the data collected from Vocabulary Strategy Inventory. Memorization by repetition and memorization by coding are concluded as two important strategies in the typology of vocabulary learning strategy by Gu and Johnson (1996) , which corresponds to 91 statements of Vocabulary Learning Questionnaire devised. In Vocabulary Learning Strategies Questionnaire (VLSQ) designed by Schmitt (1997) , 27 strategies form memory strategy and other 31 strategies fall into cognitive, metacognitive and social strategy. This can be considered as the extraction and continuity of Oxford’s classification of LLS and the most comprehensive typology of vocabulary learning strategy. In a recent study on the taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategy by Gu (2018) , 62 specific vocabulary learning strategies fall into two dimensions: metacognitive and cognitive. Among the cognitive, many strategies, for example, using dictionary, rehearsal and encoding, contribute to memorizing words. As what he points out, a wide array of vocabulary learning strategy are used to commit words to memory at different stages of language learning ( Gu, 2019 ). However, the classification of vocabulary learning strategy has also stirred up controversy because one strategy may fall into more than one group. In terms of sub-vocabulary memorization strategy, the taxonomies are sometimes inconsistent depending on the functions or purposes of a strategy in distinctive contexts. For example, verbal repetition is categorized into memorization strategy in Gu and Johnson’s typology, but cognitive strategy in Schmitt’s. Despite of such problem, the taxonomy of vocabulary learning strategy is helpful to not only extend the scope of LLS research, but also shift the focus of memorization studies from the more general memorization strategy to the specialized memorization strategy, memorization as a vocabulary learning strategy.

3.3. Vocabulary memorization use and instruction

The first focus of vocabulary memorization studies is about the frequency of vocabulary memorization use and how it works to better foreign language learners’ vocabulary learning. The research is often conducted by applying Schmitt’s questionnaire VLSQ as well as other questionnaires adapted from the previous ones, like Oxford’s SILL. Memory strategies are found to be frequently used by language learners to contribute most to vocabulary achievements in some studies ( Kafipour et al., 2011 ; Kocaman et al., 2018 ), whereas other studies report that vocabulary memorization strategy is used at a medium level, or even a low level ( Amirian and Heshmatifar, 2013 ; Kesmez, 2021 ). Moreover, attention has been given to the frequency of the sub-vocabulary memorization strategy use. Al-Qaysi and Shabdin (2016) examine the Arab students’ vocabulary memorization strategy use of four groups, namely creating mental linkages, applying images and sounds, reviewing well, employing actions, together with 25 specific vocabulary memorization strategies. It is reported that the most preferred strategy is reviewing well while employing actions is the least frequently used strategy. Besides, repetition is most favored among the subgroups of vocabulary memorization strategy because it takes effects in enhancing vocabulary retention. Based on VISQ and a semi-structured interview, Aravind and Rajasekaran (2019) reveal that Indian learners regard vocabulary memorization as an important strategy to restore and retain vocabulary. Among 25 vocabulary memorization strategies examined, the top three are to use the new word in sentences, study word with a pictorial representation of its meaning and connect word to a personal experience. The inconsistent findings about frequency use of memorization strategy and variations on sub-vocabulary memorization strategy choices by language learners might be caused by the sample size as well as the differences in participants’ age, sex and cultural backgrounds etc., which are assumed to be the potential factors that influence learners’ vocabulary memorization strategy use.

In addition to the research mostly based on questionnaires and interviews, some quantitative studies have focused on whether vocabulary memorization strategy can be learned through instructions to benefit vocabulary acquisition. The findings of the prior research seem to be consistently positive though the issue of whether LLS can be taught effectively, learned successfully and then deployed purposely by language learners are not uncommonly debatable. These studies, which intend to evaluate the effectiveness of vocabulary memorization strategy teaching, are normally conducted by instructions of a group of vocabulary memorization strategies, for instance, grouping, contextual effect, and imagery, with the engagement of a control group and an experimental group. Nemati (2009 , 2010) finds that vocabulary memorization strategy instructions are productive because learners who are taught vocabulary memorization strategies outperform the learners who receive no instructions both in an immediate test and a delayed test. The results suggest that the instruction is helpful for both short-term and long-term vocabulary retention, which is in line with the findings of Marefat and Shirazi (2003) indicating the effectiveness of vocabulary memorization strategy instructions. But, Ghorbani and Riabi (2011) , with the adoption of a similar instruction procedure, report that vocabulary memorization strategy instruction only facilitates the process of long-term EFL vocabulary retention, and its impact on short-term retention is not significant. There are also other studies that focus on the relationship between instruction of a certain vocabulary memorization strategy, such as key word method ( Tavakoli and Gerami, 2013 ), sematic mapping ( Badr and Abu-Ayyash, 2019 ), association ( Fatemeh and Ghaffar, 2012 ), and vocabulary learning achievements. The results consistently show that instructions are effective to promote vocabulary retention. To conclude, the existing literature pinpoints that instructions of vocabulary memorization strategy take effect on improvement of foreign language learners’ vocabulary learning in spite of the discrepancy on short-term and long-term retention of vocabulary, which might be attributed to the sub-vocabulary memorization strategy selected or materials used for the instructions. However, when EFL learners acquire one vocabulary memorization strategy or a set of vocabulary memorization strategies by being trained, it does not necessarily mean that they would intend to employ them in learning due to personal preferences, social contexts or other factors. Therefore, more studies on the issue of instruction, learning and use of vocabulary memorization strategy with consideration of multiple variables are needed in the future research.

4. Text memorization in FLL

4.1. concept of text memorization.

As noted above, the majority of the existing research on memorization and vocabulary memorization has been much centered on memorization of the smaller language units. But, when the material for memorization is extended from words to longer consecutive texts, the memorization process can possibly alter and become more complicated. Since text memorization is considered to be a traditional and effective learning practice in Asian countries ( Yu, 2013a ), learners are encouraged to memorize the texts, for example, sentences, passages and the entire articles when learning a foreign language. The exclusion of the more complex language material in memorization studies and the Asian foreign language learners’ success achieved by reliance on reciting textual materials have prompted, in the past recent years, some scholars to investigate the differentiations of memorization procedures resulted from the changes of the length of language materials to memorize. Therefore, in order to distinguish the early memorization and vocabulary memorization, a more specialized terminology, text memorization, is used in the literature to particularly define foreign language learners’ strategic behavior to memorize longer linguistic components generalized as texts.

4.2. Text memorization use

The early observation correlating memorization to text is made by Pennycook (1996) , who points out the role of acceptable borrowing through memorization of texts in FLL by looking at learning in a Chinese context. The successive studies on text memorization use have focused on three respects. With regard to the gains brought by text memorization ( Ding, 2007) , by the interview with three winners in the English speaking and debate contest at the national level in China, it is reported that the practice of text memorization and imitation helps language learners attend to and learn collocations and sequences, which can be borrowed for language production. In addition, it enables leaners to make improvement on pronunciation and develop the habit of attending to the details of language. Finally, it is concluded that noticing and rehearsal can be enhanced to be beneficial to FLL. Based on a semi-structured interview administrated to 62 students and teachers from junior, senior high school and college, the qualitative findings from Yu (2013b) reveal that text memorization could facilitate language learning psychologically in three aspects: cultivation of “language sense,” establishment of conscious learning, and increase of psychological satisfaction built on learners’ sense of achievement and confidence. And more specifically, it could help improve the learning of phrases, sentence structures and grammar, develop writing and speaking skills, and enhance vocabulary learning in the contexts. Besides qualitative analysis, a few quantitative studies have been conducted to reveal the effectiveness of text memorization. Dai and Ding (2010) find that compared to learners without practicing text memorization, learners from the experimental group who practice text memorization perform better in both English proficiency test and writing test. Moreover, text memorization enables the high achievers to use FSs, the multiword expressions that occur frequently as coherent semantic units, more accurately and the low achievers to learn to use more FSs in a broader range of variety.

4.3. Text memorization procedure

In terms of how language learners proceed with text memorization, some attempts are made in the prior studies. One potential concern for text memorization is the selection of the texts that are suitable to memorize. Harris (2015) proposes such criteria consisting of five items: appropriateness of difficulty level, stimulating and memorable content, concrete content and clear writing, a natural and logical flow in the text, the presence of rhythm and/or rhyme. Furthermore, in order to ease the task of text memorization, a systematic method including the top-down strategy and the bottom-up strategy to analyze the articles for memorization is depicted. The top-down strategy requires the examination of the overall content, according to which four steps need to be followed: read through the texts, focus on the main idea, structure establishment and analysis of each sentence for general idea. Whereas the bottom-up involves the analysis at lexical level, for instance, identification of formulaic chunks and core words, and to note how the words are combined to create meaning.

As to what specific strategies are deployed in the process of text memorization, some frequently used sub-strategies for text memorization, such as imitation ( Ding, 2007 ), recitation ( Yu, 2017 ), and reading aloud ( Yu and Liu, 2018 ), are pointed out in the previous literature. In a more recent study, Wang (2023) develops a new system of text memorization strategies based on the analysis of Chinese EFL learners’ text memorization process and strategies deployed. So far, studies to present a system of text memorization strategy are limited. However, it is necessary to treat a variety of text memorization strategies in a systematic manner and categorize them into different groups. Though the classification might also be questioned as the taxonomy of memorization and vocabulary memorization has been criticized, it would come to the aid of foreign language learners to be aware or conscious of these strategies to benefit their learning.

To conclude, a common and noticeable merit of text memorization discovered in the literature lies in the opportunities it offers for learners to memorize FSs in the meaningful contexts. Moreover, text memorization is often associated with text analysis for understanding which in turn reinforces the memorization effects. To date, the majority of studies on text memorization as an FLL strategy are conducted by Asian scholars probably in that it is culturally oriented. It is assumed that like vocabulary memorization, text memorization can also be taught and learned, but studies on text memorization instruction can be rarely found and need to be explored in the future.

5. Influential factors of memorization use

Griffiths and Soruç (2020) underpin that all the individual variables be examined in a holistic way since one variable could rely on another or more to construct a complex, dynamic and situated system to be influential to language learning. Therefore, memorization strategy can interact with many other factors to influence learners’ language development.

The findings about memorization use and FLL learners’ language proficiency in the existing documents are comparatively consistent. The comparison is normally made between beginner (lower level) and advanced (higher level) learners and sometimes the intermediate learners are also concerned. It is revealed in many studies that the more proficient FLL learners use less memorization strategies than the less proficient learners and the role that memorization strategy plays in language learning seems not as significant as other LLSs to the more proficient learners ( Shmais, 2003 ; Gharbavi and Mousavi, 2012 ). The advanced foreign language learners tend to favor non-memory strategy, for example, metacognitive strategy rather than memorization strategy to plan and regulate their language learning process ( Lee and Heinz, 2016 ; Lin, 2017 ). Therefore, an inverse relationship between language proficiency and memorization strategy use has been found. Language proficiency has become an important factor that influences learners’ memorization strategy use.

Among all the potential variables (e.g., age, sex, belief etc.), culture has been extensively explicated as being associated with memorization stagey use. Traditionally, it seems recognized that foreign language learners from the culture greatly influenced by Confucianism, mostly Chinese, Korean and Japanese, prefer to deploy memorization as their major LLS, which is supported by a succession of studies concerning memorization use ( Biggs, 1996 ; Cortazzi and Jin, 1996 ; Tan, 2011 ). However, the findings from many of the more recent studies reveal that not only learners with Confucian background give priority to memorization use in the FLL process, but also learners with a little or no Confucian influence frequently make the most of memorization strategy and find it efficient to strengthen their FLL learning. For example, Pakistani EFL learners’ memorization strategy is reported to be more significant than social and affective strategy in a survey-based study ( Khan et al., 2018 ). By interviewing 18 English learners, the findings reveal that memorization strategy is frequently used by Indonesian EFL learners and it is helpful to improve their English proficiency ( Alfian, 2021 ), which mirrors Rianto’s (2020) study suggesting that Indonesian learners rely on memorization strategy highly. Moreover, some studies, inquiring into the cognitive language learning process of CFL (Chinese as a foreign language) learners, find that European and American CFL learners, similarly, take advantage of memorization strategy in their learning process ( Jiang and Cohen, 2012 ). For example, in the study involving 190 English students, Grenfell and Harris (2015) explore the memorization strategies used by English CFL learners and conclude that these strategies are beneficial to their Chinese learning. Therefore, memorization strategy is not only the preference of learners influenced by Confucian philosophy, but of learners with other cultural backgrounds. However, the low use of memorization strategy by students with a little or no Confucian background is also found in a few other studies ( Magno, 2010 ; Alhaisoni, 2012 ). When culture is taken into account, the results about memorization use in FLL remains contradictory and thus confusing, which makes the issue of memorization use more complicated. Such controversy might lie in that culture is not always the only factor influencing learners’ strategy use, but other factors like personality and age would work together. Therefore, a holistic view needs to be taken to further interpret memorization strategy use in language learning.

Thus far, only a few studies on how other variables such as age, sex and belief interact with memorization strategy to influence FLL can be found. In terms of age and sex, the findings of study by Jiang and Smith (2009) suggest that both two variables do not significantly influence the frequency of memorization use in FLL. In their research, based on an investigation into 13 Chinese EFL learners aged from 8 to 40, it is found that all the participants report much use of memorization though some specific strategies to learn vocabulary and grammar and the frequency of use of mother tongue differ. With regard to the relationship among belief, memorization use and learning achievement, Rashidi and Omid (2011) conclude that Iranian EFL learners’ beliefs and memorization strategy use is positively correlated, but there is no significant association between learners’ beliefs about rote memorization and their learning achievements.

To summarize, varieties of factors that influence memorization strategy use have been investigated, such as FLL learners’ language proficiency, culture, age, sex and belief. But how memorization strategy functions with other individual differences to impact language learning remains unknown. Therefore, the perception of multiple interactions of memorization with other variables should be taken in future research to provide more evidence on memorization use.

6. Suggestions for future research

The past 50 years’ research on memorization strategy in FLL can be concluded to experience three phases with different focuses: the initial studies on memorization, the following studies on vocabulary memorization and then the extended studies on text memorization. Based on a review of the previous achievements made and the problematic issues diagnosed, some suggestions for future research on memorization and FLL are proposed.

The research perspectives need to be expanded. First, memorization strategy use is contextually situated, so it is impacted by foreign language learners’ sociocultural environment. Memorization can also interact with many other individual differences, such as motivation, age, sex etc., to influence language development. Moreover, in practice, memorization strategies seldom function in isolation, but in sequences or clusters. Language learners tend to employ varieties of sub-memorization strategies and other LLSs simultaneously or in an overlapping approach to increase learning effectiveness. Therefore, memorization strategy in FLL is suggested to be examined with the introduction of the theory of social-ecological context and holism. Second, though FLL and SLL (second language learning) share some similarities in the learning procedures, FLL and SLL learners’ memorization use could differ. For example, when a group of Chinese EFL learners move from China to Singapore in an ESL setting, great changes in task demands and input/output opportunities are brought out because of the changes of the learning contexts ( Gu, 2010 ). Chinese EFL learners have to employ more effective memorization strategies in a non-English speaking context because opportunities for them to be exposed to English are limited. To EFL learners, learning English in a natural language environment is barely possible. So it is strongly suggested to draw a clear division line between memorization strategy use in FLL and SLL while memorization strategy is investigated. Third, when the materials to memorize extend from short language units to longer language elements, the memorization process and the sub-memorization strategies involved could alter accordingly. As a result, the length of the materials for memorization should be considered carefully when studies of memorization are conducted.

More research topics can be suggested. Many previous studies have mostly focused on correlating choice of memorization strategy (including the early memorization, vocabulary memorization and text memorization) to culture or learners’ language proficiency. In future studies, the relationship between FLL and other potential variables, for instance, personality, interest, and motivation, needs to be explored so as to provide a more holistic insight into language learners’ memorization use. Furthermore, in terms of vocabulary memorization instruction and learning, future research could be concerned about to what extent learners are willing to use memorization strategies after they are successfully acquired. After all it is a sort of personal preference not independent on one’s learning style and other differences. In addition, with regard to text memorization, a variety of issues could be further researched. First, since the process of text memorization becomes more complicated with longer materials and more sub-strategies involved, researchers need to reveal the procedure of memorizing these materials, that is, how learners treat longer language elements to increase memorization effectiveness to facilitate their language learning. Second, series of sub-strategies of text memorization need to be presented with a systematic taxonomy in the future studies to enable language learners to learn and put them into practice to enhance their language learning. Third, theoretically, with the accumulation and storage of more consecutive language materials, language learners are able to retrieve language information when needed in the specialized language areas, but evidence that supports this assumption are not adequate. Therefore, more attention can be paid to uncover the role that text memorization plays in improving learners’ language skill levels, especially that of speaking and writing. Fourth, the issue about whether text memorization strategies can be instructed, learned and then employed by language learners is also worthy of being researched.

Research methodologies are suggested to be more diversified. Many researchers have designed either qualitative or quantitative research to discover the relationship between memorization and FLL. The quantitative methods are concerned with the whole group of language learners’ average response to memorization-related issues while the qualitative methods focus on subjective views and experiences of individuals. Since with the application of both qualitative and quantitative approaches, the quantitative and qualitative research strengths can be combined and the best of both paradigms can be brought out ( Zoltán, 2007 ), it is suggested that more mixed methods research be developed so that the qualitative and quantitative data can be triangulated each other to improve the research validity. Moreover, in the previous studies, among a number of ways for quantitative data collection, the most widely-used instrument is the questionnaire and the intervention method is ignored. However, the experimental or quasi-experimental approach is significantly effective to tackle the problem about the relationship between memorization and FLL. Particularly, when the memorization outcome and its impact on FLL are examined and the effectiveness of memorization strategy instruction is explored, a comparison between the experimental group and the control group can provide more credible evidence. So, in the cases where the effects of initial group difference can be well controlled, more experimental or quasi-experimental research is suggested to be conducted.

7. Conclusion and limitations

This paper provides a narrative review on the historical development of research on memorization as an FLL strategy. Taken as a whole, the research on memorization and FLL in the past half century lies in three aspects according to the length of the linguistic materials to memorize: Memorization, Vocabulary Memorization and Text Memorization. In the review, the research status of the three types of memorization in FLL, with focus on their concepts, categorizations, uses, instructions and influential factors, are analyzed. The analysis on these themes and gaps in relation to memorization and FLL can be beneficial to the research in the future to better explain foreign language learners’ use of different types of memorization strategy and learning behaviors, thus facilitating their language learning. Since memorization as an FLL strategy and a cluster of psychological and socio-culture variables involved constitute a complex system, with the employment of diversified methods, the more extensive and in-depth research with focus on the enriched topics from different perspectives is needed in the future.

Although this narrative review provides new insights into research on memorization and foreign language learning, only the articles that center on English as a foreign language and a few articles that focus on Chinese as a foreign language are included. Moreover, the relevant articles reviewed are all published in English and non-English ones are not concerned. In addition, since text memorization is a comparatively new topic compared to memorization and vocabulary memorization in the field of foreign language learning, articles available to be reviewed are limited. Therefore, the results need to be cautiously interpreted when the relationship between memorization and other language as a foreign language and the association between text memorization and foreign language learning are researched. Future studies are suggested to include the literature that explores learners’ use of memorization in learning other language as a foreign language to offer more evidence to explain foreign language learners’ memorization use in the process of learning.

Author contributions

QW: Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing.

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by Social Science Foundation of Shaanxi Province, China (2019M006); Education and Teaching Reform Project of Xi’an University of Technology (xjy2143): 2021 Graduate Education and Teaching Reform of Xi’an University of Technology.

Conflict of interest

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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