Syntactic Complexity In The Writings Of Secondary School EFL Learners:Insights From A Syntactically-Annotated Corpus

This study delves into syntactic complexity in the writings of secondary school EFL learners with low and intermediate language proficiency,and compares syntactic complexity between the writings of secondary school non-native speakers and secondary school native speakers.The learner data consist of 410 narrative compositions written by secondary school students from six grades,which are grouped into three writing proficiency levels according to participants' grade levels and writing scores.The native speakers' data are 40 compositions sampled from the Growth in Grammar corpus,a data collection of school essays produced by UK students.Syntactic complexity is operationalized as a multi-dimensional construct in this study,encompassing three sub-constructs: large-grained syntactic elaboration,fine-grained syntactic elaboration,and syntactic diversity.Eighteen syntactic complexity measures under these sub-constructs are utilized,which are obtained from L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and two syntactically-annotated corpora.In terms of syntactic complexity in the writings of the three levels,the results of large-grained measures show that mean lengths of T-unit and sentence,dependent clauses per clause,and complex nominals per clause are four reliable and effective measures to gauge the writing proficiency of secondary school EFL learners.The results of fine-grained measures yield the following two findings: 1)Relative clauses,including adjectival relative clauses,and prepositional phrases as noun modifiers emerge later in the writings of our participants compared with other target fine-grained structures,which may be partly caused by the input order of these structures in textbooks;2)the normalized frequencies of adverbial clauses,complement clauses,relative clauses,prepositional phrases as noun modifiers,adjectival relative clauses,and prepositional phrases as verb complements are valid indicators of writing proficiency of young adolescent EFL learners.The results of the syntactic diversity measure reveal that it is positively correlated with writing proficiency,implying that syntactic diversity is a desirable attribute to decide the writing scores of secondary school EFL learners.With regard to the differences of syntactic complexity between the writings of non-native speakers and native speakers,it is found that 1)non-native speakers employ less complex syntactic constructions than native speakers in terms of a range of measures,such as length of production unit,amount of subordination,degree of phrasal sophistication,and the frequencies of complement clauses,relative clauses,and prepositional phrases as noun modifiers;and 2)despite the underuse of substantial grammatical structures,the performance of non-native speakers approximates that of native speakers in terms of five measures,that is,the amount of sentential coordination,and the normalized frequencies of adverbial clauses,possessive modifiers,adjectival modifiers,and prepositional phrases as adverbials,suggesting the solid command of these structures by L2 learners.