A Corpus-based Study On Syntactic Complexity In College-level English Argumentative Writing

Complexity,fluency and accuracy are three main measures to reflect English learners’ writing ability in second language writing,which have appealed the interest of an increasing number of researchers in the second language writing study.Syntactic complexity is an important index of good writing in holistic rating,which many studies have applied to examine English learners’ language proficiency and the development traces of writing.Most of the previous researches investigated a small number of samples in the development of writing ability.A few studies are corpus-based to compare different first language background English learners’ syntactic complexity.The present study mainly seeks to address the following three research questions:(1)What are the different features of syntactic complexity between Chinese English major learners,international English learners and native speakers in argumentative writing?(2)What’s the relationship between syntactic complexity of Chinese students’ English argumentative writing and writing quality?(3)What’s the strength of the relationship between different pairs of syntactic complexity measures in argumentative writing?The study data was collected from three corpora,namely Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL),the International Corpus of Learner English(ICLE)and Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS).600 essays were randomly selected from the three corpora with 200 each corpus.The study used L2 Syntactic Complex Analyzer which was developed by Lu(2010)to analyze the essays with 14 syntactic complexity measures in terms of five dimensions,namely,length of production,overall sentence complexity,amount of subordination,amount of coordination and degree of phrasal sophistication.Firstly,a comparison between the three corpora is conducted to test any possible difference in the essays of diverse L1 background learners.Secondly,100 essays were randomly selected from the WECCL group in two topics with each topic 50 scored by two raters.The 100 essays were rated according to scoring standard and the final writing score is the average score of the two raters.A correlation analysis is conducted to test the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality.Lastly,further analysis to examine the strength of 14 different pairs of syntactic complexity measures.The results of the present study are mainly as follows:First of all,there are significant differences in syntactic complexity between the WECCL and ICLE group,WECCL and LOCNESS group.The five dimensions of syntactic complexity reached statistical significance which indicates that compared with international English learners and native learners,Chinese English learners are less developed in syntactic complexity.International English learners and native speaker learners can write longer production units.In terms of degree of subordination,ICLE and LOCNESS group also outperform Chinese English learners.However,there is no statistical significance in the measure of T-units per sentence.T-units per sentence couldn’t work as a measure to differentiate learners’ syntactic complexity.With respect to the degree of subordination,overall sentence complexity and phrasal sophistication.The former two groups are more competent than Chinese English learners.Secondly,data revealed significant weak correlations between the holistic ratings and syntactic complexity.The scores of the topic one reached statistical significance in the measures of mean length of clause and mean length of T-unit at the length level while topic two with complex nominals per T-unit and complex nominals per clause at the phrasal level.Thirdly,some pairs of syntactic complexity measures have reached significant high correlations.It showed that the length of production and amount of subordination measures could better differentiate learners’ writing.The teaching implications of the study maybe summarized as follows: different L1 learners have different syntactic complexity in their writing while Chinese English learners are still at a rather low level.English teachers should pay more attention to practice the development of syntactic complexity in writing class.Some syntactic complexity measures have a significant correlation with writing quality.These measures should be considered in a holistic rating of English writing.The syntactic complexity could be one of the criteria to assess L2 writing quality.