Aparici Aznar, MelinaRosado Villegas, ElisaVilar Weber, HugoCuberos Vicente, María del RocíoTolchinsky Brenman, Liliana2025-10-252025-10-252024Aparici M, Rosado E, Vilar H, Cuberos R and Tolchinsky L (2024) The influence of students’ linguistic condition, school level, and pedagogical input on analytical essay features. Front. Lang. Sci. 3:1480422. doi: 10.3389/flang.2024.148042210.3389/flang.2024.1480422https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14352/125372• SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/flang.2024.1480422/full#supplementary-material • FUNDING: The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. The study was supported by research grants PID2020-119555GA-I00 [Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades; M. Aparici (PI)], EDU2015-65980-R [MINECO-Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad; J. Perera and L. Tolchinsky (PI)], and by a Margarita Salas postdoctoral research grant awarded to Rocío Cuberos [University of Barcelona, the European Union-Next Generation EU, and the Spanish Ministry of Universities].Introduction: Analytical essays are a fundamental discourse practice within educational settings. These essays are topic-oriented texts that aim to inform readers about a specific matter while persuading them of the writer’s perspective. This study investigates how students’ linguistic condition (monolingual vs. bilingual) affects their ability to meet the social and discursive expectations of analytical essays. This is examined both over a broad developmental span, from elementary to higher education, and microdevelopmentally, through a sequence of genre-oriented classroom activities. Methods: A corpus of 1,179 essays, written by Spanish monolingual and Catalan/Spanish bilingual students across elementary, secondary, and university levels, was analyzed. Participants were tasked with producing texts on both same and different topics. The analysis focused on lexical, syntactic-discursive and structural features identified as indicators of writing proficiency in the Developing Analytical Writing (DAW) model developed in previous studies. Pedagogical input was controlled by the researchers, and an external evaluation of text quality was performed by teachers from the different school levels. Results: Results indicate that students’ linguistic condition influenced most, but not all, the linguistic and structural indicators of writing proficiency but always in interaction with age/school level and pedagogical input. Improvements were observed across school levels and with pedagogical input. Additionally, teachers varied in their appreciation of different facets of writing performance as a function of the participants’ age/school level and pedagogical input. However, the linguistic condition of students alone did not significantly impact external evaluations of text quality. Discussion: Our findings reveal a complex interplay between factors such as writers’ linguistic condition, their age/school level, and pedagogical input, which jointly shape the quality of analytical essays.engAttribution 4.0 Internationalhttp://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/journal article2813-4605https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2024.1480422https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-sciences/articles/10.3389/flang.2024.1480422/fullhttps://www.frontiersin.org/journals/language-scienceshttps://www.frontiersin.org/open access81'24681'27Analytical writingDevelopmental changesCatalan/Spanish bilingualsSpanish monolingualsText productionElementary to university levelText featuresLingüísticaSociología de la educación (Educación)5701.03 Bilingüismo5705.10 Sociolingüística6306.05 Sociología de la Educación5801.06 Evaluación de Alumnos