English learners may improve their writing skills in the language if they focus on making good arguments rather than mastering complex grammar and vocabulary, according to new Japanese research.

The study — the first of its kind — by Kobe University linguistics professor Sachiko Yasuda was published on Thursday in the journal Assessing Writing.

In 2023, Yasuda conducted an experiment in which she had 102 students at a public secondary school in Japan write an argumentative essay on an assigned topic in English. She then let two writing experts — who did not know the purpose of the experiment — grade their essays.

She broke the results down into three groups — high-scoring essays, essays with medium scores and those with low scores — and analyzed the differences to determine the relationship between the texts’ linguistic complexity and the writers’ ability to present complex arguments.

The results showed that essays containing more compound nouns with “semantic density,” rather than complex grammar using conjunctions such as “if,” “when” and “because,” tended to score high.

“More complexity due to longer units and more clauses does not necessarily mean ‘better’ (writing),” Yasuda said. “Expert writers can express complex ideas more simply than novices.”

This runs contrary to conventional thinking in the instruction of English as a foreign language, where longer units or longer clauses have been considered the hallmark of sophisticated writing, she said.

She cited the following text as an example:

A: If you go to a foreign country to study, you will meet new people and speak English.

B: Studying abroad gives you the opportunity to meet new people and speak English.

The second sentence, though grammatically simpler, explains the idea better and provides more “semantic density,” she said.

The findings shed light on the long-term trend of Japanese people ranking low in English proficiency compared with people in other countries where English is not the first language, despite many studying the language in school for 10 or more years.

Yasuda said the way English writing is taught in Japan is partly to blame, adding that there’s room for improvement in education.

“Empirical studies conducted in Japan to date have shown that writing tends to be the most neglected of the four skills in English classes at junior high and high schools,” she said.

While the education ministry recently introduced a new subject called “logic and expression” in its new curriculum guidelines, many teachers, in practice, are still focusing on grammar acquisition, she said.

Instead, in secondary education, teachers should give students writing topics that compel them to express their opinions, Yasuda said, adding that teachers should first encourage students to write large volumes of text without worrying so much about them making mistakes, thereby achieving fluency first.

“At present, accuracy is valued over fluency,” she said.