Textual Variation in L2 Academic Writing: A Study of Cultural Visibility in Lexico-Grammatical Choices and Semantic Relations

The impact of culture on academic writing in terms of the lexico-grammatical choices and semantic relations between and across clauses formally referred to as cohesion has been reported to cause textual variations in second language writing. Premised on this assumption, this study investigates the argumentative essays of Saudi EFL students to gauge the extent to which the use of cohesive devices in academic writing is impacted by the cultural framework. The results obtained through non-parametric correlation analysis revealed that culture did impact the choice of cohesion devices but was not pervasive enough to establish the claim of previous research. Word-level lexical repetition was the most statistically significant cohesive device which corresponded with the cultural framework followed by statistically non-significant instances of the additive conjunction, the General noun, and the context-based Reference. The author argues that the pedagogic and learning processes overshadow the cultural impact as student writers acquire writing proficiency to produce academically appropriate texts. However, an analysis of the narrative or the descriptive writing can further validate the findings of this research. The study also recommends a cross-cultural and cross-linguistic analysis of both English and Arabic texts to further substantiate the notion of cultural influences in creating textual variations.