The present study examines the relationships among the variables believed to affect Spanish undergraduates' willingness to communicate in English. The participants were 195 students majoring in several degrees at the University of Oviedo. A questionnaire and a standardized English Test were administered to the students in February-March 2013. Regression analysis showed that the Spanish undergraduates' motivation to learn English had a significant relationship with their willingness to communicate in English. Results also showed a significant positive relationship between self-perceived communication competence and willingness to communicate, and a significant negative relationship between anxiety and self-perceived communication competence. Finally, results show a significant relationship between self-perceived communication competence and L2 competence. A gender difference in the effect of self-perceived competence on actual L2 competence was another finding of the present study.

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The present study seeks to compare the writing products of EFL undergraduates using as measures accuracy and grammatical complexity. It also intends to describe the evolution of the morphological and syntactic errors as English is used by learners. A total of 100 learners of English as a foreign language participated in the study. They were divided into two groups according to their Oxford Placement Test score: group A was formed by 36 advanced students; and group B was made up of 64 upper intermediate students. Compositions were collected as the basis of this study. Results show that upper intermediate students exhibited a higher error mean in each of the error categories, namely, grammatical morphemes, lexical choice and syntax, as well as punctuation and spelling. However, an analysis of variance shows the differences between groups to be significant only in spelling errors and in punctuation errors.

The aim of this paper is to explore and measure language learners’ performance in L2 writing production using the complexity, accuracy, and fluency constructs. A total of 123 secondary education students took part in the study. Results are manifold. In the first place, they show that the measures of fluency, accuracy, grammatical and lexical complexity progress in a significant way: fourth grade students outperform first graders in the aforementioned measures. Secondly, fewer correlations between the writing measures used and the general quality of the compositions are found among the older students than among the younger ones, indicating that the correlations change depending on learners’ age. Thirdly, 1st year students exhibit a higher ratio of errors, both in general and also by error category, although only two types decrease significantly in 4th year students: syntactic and spelling errors. Lastly, we find that errors tend to develop in a non-linear way.

The present study investigated what aspects of academic writing improved, if any, at the completion of one semester of studying an EAP course titled Advanced Academic English, which was specifically designed for undergraduate students from the degree in English Studies at a Spanish university. This study aimed to ascertain the nature and extent of the development of the English L2 writing proficiency of 59 college-level EFL learners at an advanced level of English proficiency over the time of a short-term academic English language programme by means of quantitative measures targeting different components of the syntactic complexity of the learners’ writing performance (global, clausal and phrasal). Results point to a significant increase in coordination and clausal and phrasal elaboration, at the expense of subordination. Results also suggest a tendency towards greater use of more complex phrasal constructions by more competent writers. Overall, these results underscore the importance of syntactic complexity, particularly nominal complexity in producing successful academic writing, and highlight the pedagogical attention that should be paid to the production and meaning of such structures in EAP courses and in L2 English writing instruction in general.