Contemporary Research Analysis Journal

Grammatical accuracy in multilingual academic writing is commonly treated either as a surface error count or as a broad proxy for overall writing quality. Both approaches weaken construct validity and make it difficult to distinguish a polished text from durable language development. This theory-driven integrative review proposes adaptive grammatical control as a bounded construct referring to writers’ capacity to select, realize, monitor, and transfer grammatical resources across academic tasks with progressively less external support. A purposive corpus of 40 publications was synthesized through construct comparison, mechanism mapping, counterevidence analysis, and contextual interpretation; 82.5% of the sources were published between 2021 and 2026, and 97.5% were journal articles. The review identifies four layers: formal grammatical accuracy, discourse-functional grammatical control, genre-conditioned deployment, and broader rhetorical-disciplinary effectiveness. Only the first two constitute the core construct. Findings further distinguish antecedents, learning mechanisms, mediators, moderators, immediate performance, retention, and transfer. Written feedback and generative artificial intelligence are positioned as potentially useful supports whose developmental value depends on active uptake and later unassisted performance. Vietnamese EFL higher education is used as an illustrative case rather than the empirical foundation of the model. The review concludes with six testable propositions and a measurement architecture for separating textual accuracy, processing, supported performance, retention, and cross-task transfer.

academic writing, grammatical accuracy, generative AI, multilingual writers, written feedback