A Corpus-based Study Of The Developmental Patterns Of Fluency, Accuracy And Complexity In Chinese English Majors' Argumentative Writings

This study aims to find out the developmental patterns of fluency, accuracy and complexity in Chinese English majors'argumentative writings.Three research questions are addressed in this study.1. What is the developmental pattern of fluency in Chinese English majors'argumentative writings during their four-year study?2. What is the developmental pattern of accuracy in Chinese English majors'argumentative writings during their four-year study?3. What is the developmental pattern of complexity in Chinese English majors'argumentative writings during their four-year study?The corpus employed in the present study was the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL). Altogether 60 timed argumentative writings were selected with 15 from each grade in which genre, topic and length were taken into consideration. And the data analysis involved five steps: editing the selected writings; constructing a stop-wordlist; tagging the selected compositions; making 4 calculations: 1) the fluency through T-unit length, 2) the accuracy through words/error ratio, 3) lexical complexity through both lexical variation and lexical density, and 4) syntactical complexity through both average sentence length and subordinated structure ratio; and comparing them with One-way ANOVA.The major findings of this study are presented as follows:Firstly, fluency, accuracy and complexity develop very fast in Chinese English majors'argumentative writings from Grade One to Grade Two. This pattern indicates that English majors make more progress in writing after one-year study. Another possible interpretation is that TEM-4 can be the driving force leading to the fast development from Grade One to Grade Two.Secondly, from Grade Two to Grade Three, fluency, accuracy, lexical density, and syntactical complexity develop relatively slowly compared with the former period. Only lexical variation drops sharply. The slow development might be due to fossilization and the plateau period in writing.Finally, from Grade Three to Grade Four, fluency develops very slowly because of job hunting pressure and tiredness from long-term study. Both lexical variation and lexical density develop very fast, which might be due to TEM-8. Syntactical complexity and accuracy tend to drop slightly. This tendency may be attributed to the shift of focus from accuracy and complexity to creative ideas and logical organizations in academic writing.The pedagogical implications of the present study lie in three aspects:Firstly, now that each aspect develops very fast in the first year, the teachers should devise various effective task-based activities to help the students enhance this tendency.Secondly, the possible fossilization and plateau period in writing require the teachers be capable of predicting those aspects that are liable to fossilized in students'interlanguage through their teaching experience and capable of helping students to bridge plateau period by using reasonable learning strategies and effective task-based activities.Thirdly, both regular writing and academic writing should be stressed for the former emphasizes grammaticality while the latter emphasizes creative idea and logical organization.However, the present study has its own limitations and calls for improvement in future study.In the first place, the error tagging process may have discrepancy for there are no comprehensive guidelines.Secondly, the investigation of lexis doesn't take the actual use of words into account, so in future research, the depth of the word knowledge should be explored.Finally, individual differences in the development of the three features are not taken into consideration.