A Study On The Correlations Between Syntactic Complexity And English Writing Quality Of Senior One Students

Writing is particularly important for senior high school students since it serves as a crucial gauge of whether and to what extent students have acquired specific language knowledge.Syntactic complexity is frequently viewed as a key indicator for judging language proficiency and performance in second-or foreign-language learners(Ortega 2003;Ellis & Yuan 2004;Bao 2010).However,in actual writing teaching,some English teachers frequently overlook certain aspects and instead place a greater emphasis on students’ overall or comprehensive writing skills.Syntactic complexity has drawn a lot of attention as a crucial concept in second language writing instruction and research.Unfortunately,the study of syntactic complexity in high school English writing has not yet reached a sufficient level of maturity,and some English teachers seldom place a strong emphasis on teaching syntactic complexity in their instruction.Based on previous research findings,this study computationally analyzes writing samples using the L2 syntactic complexity analyzer to explore the characteristics of the indicators of senior high school English writing syntactic complexity measures and the relationship between complexity and composition quality in a multidimensional manner.It seeks to address the following questions.(1)What are the differences in the indicators of measuring syntactic complexity of English narrative writing by senior one students of different levels?(2)What is the correlation between syntactic complexity and writing quality of senior one students’ English narrative essays?In this study,100 students from the first grade of XX Senior High School in Fuyang,Anhui Province were selected and given a time limit of 20 minutes to write a100-word English narrative text,and the written text was analyzed using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)from 14 indicators in 5 dimensions of syntactic complexity.Using the SPSS statistical tool,the collected data were also subjected to independent sample t-tests and correlation tests.The findings are as follows:(1)All 10 indices of syntactic complexity varied between the higher and lower groups.There are notable disparities between the written texts of the higher and lower subgroups,whether it be in terms of production unit length,the use of subordinate sentences,a particular phrase structure,or total sentence complexity.The lower-scoring group had trouble writing lengthy sentences,whereas the higher-scoring group tended to put more emphasis on carefully crafted sentence structure than length.(2)Among the indicators of syntactic complexity,10 indicators had significant positive correlations with composition quality,with the highest correlation between mean length of sentence(MLS)and writing quality.This indicates the characteristics of high school ELLs as a group,who perform less well in syntactic complexity compared to college ELLs,and also reflects the fact that the criteria used to rate high school ELLs as a whole focus more on average sentence length.The current study argues that teachers should consider learners’ writing levels in classroom instruction and tailor instruction to their needs.Students should be encouraged to use and output more complex and varied syntactic structures in the classroom instead of striving for long sentences.Secondly,different teaching methods and teaching strategies should be used for different students to provide targeted training to enrich students’ syntactic structures and thus improve the quality of writing.