New JESLA article: Chitez, Dinca & Bucur (2026)

Previous research on second language (L2) English and L2 French has shown that phraseological complexity, including diversity and sophistication, increases with proficiency. This study examines phraseological complexity in the academic writing of Romanian university students learning L2 English, comparing their performance with expert Romanian writers. We examine whether Romanian learners’ phraseology becomes more complex at the expert writing level compared to novice levels and identify the categories of phraseological complexity that improve with proficiency. We view Romanian students as novice writers still developing necessary linguistic and rhetorical skills, while expert writers are Romanian scholars who publish in high-quality academic journals. To conduct our analysis, we compare the ROGER corpus, representing novice writing, with the EXPRES corpus, representing expert writing. We apply a dependency-based approach to measuring phraseological complexity, focusing on adjectival modifiers, adverbial modifiers, and direct objects. Our results show that complexity does not consistently increase from novice to expert level, especially for adverbial modifiers and direct objects, where both groups demonstrated low sophistication. This suggests that while some improvements occur, expert L2 writers still fall short of matching native expert phraseological profiles. Qualitative analysis highlights the specific phrases distinguishing novice from expert writers.