A Study On The Influence Of Input Text Complexity On Syntactic Complexity And Accuracy Of Senior High School Students’ English Continuation Writing

Syntactic complexity is one of the most important indicators to measure the writing language performance of second language learners.However,there are relatively few studies that use syntactic complexity as a variable to judge its influence on the continuation writing of high school learners.Based on the synergy theory,Skehan’s limited cognitive resources theory and Robinson’s cognitive hypothesis theory,this study investigates the influence of the syntactic complexity of input text on the syntactic complexity and accuracy of the continuation writing of senior high school students.This study uses L2SCA to select two input texts with significant differences in syntactic complexity.Based on the classification of these two input texts,the sequels of the subjects are constructed into two small corpora.After analyzing and comparing the two groups of sequels of 74 sophomore high school students,the findings are made.The syntactic complexity of the subjects is synergistic with that of the previous text,and the specific degree of synergism varies with different indicators.Syntactic complexity synergy is mainly reflected in long sentences,complex sentences,compound sentences and verb phrases,but not in complex noun phrases.No significant difference was found in the accuracy of the sequels.The results show that there is a synergistic effect on syntactic complexity,but the effect of complexity synergy on accuracy is not obvious.The knowledge structure located in the second language learner’s recent development area is more likely to be synergistic.Therefore,teachers can choose the story pretexts that are more in line with students’ recent development areas as the pre-reading materials for students,strengthen the training of continuation writing,guide the ideas of writing and expand the expression skills.The results of this study further confirm the synergistic effect of the continuation writing,but it is inconsistent with Skehan’s theory of limited cognitive resources and Robinson’s theory of cognitive hypothesis.