Local Grammar Approach to Investigating Advanced Chinese EFL Learners’ Development of Communicative Competence in Academic Writing: The Case of ‘Exemplification’

Abstract This study belongs to a larger project which aims to systematically explore advanced Chinese EFL learners’ developmental pattern of communicative competence in academic context, with the current investigation zooming in on their performance of exemplification in academic writing. It draws on insights from local grammar research, as local grammars have been shown to be able to reliably quantify the lexicogrammatical realisations of a given communicative or discourse act. Using L1 Chinese English-major students’ MA and PhD degree dissertations as the data, the investigation shows that, although their overall use of exemplification remained steady from MA to PhD levels of study, there are significant differences with regard to their preference of exemplifying strategies as well as their lexicogrammatical choices they used to realise exemplification. The study not only has implications for academic writing research, assessment and pedagogy, but also offers a useful methodological approach to longitudinal investigation into EFL learners’ development of communicative competence in academic context.