A Study On The Syntactic Features Of English Majors In English Writing

A sentence plays an important role in writing. Features of sentence influence thewhole quality of the article and may reflect a student's language competence, which isindicated in terms of syntactic variation and sophistication etc. The development ofsyntactic features has been studied in a considerable amount of research. However, inChina, the relative studies are few due to the difficulties in data collection andanalysis. This research studies the syntactic features in terms of syntactic complexity,syntactic variety and cohesion.The research makes a contrastive and quantitative approach on syntactic featuresin compositions from sophomores of English majors. Two groups of students werechosen. One group was from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL),which is suber-corpus of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(SWECCL). Thirty compositions on five topics finished in limited time werecollected at random from the sophomores of English majors; another thirtycompositions were chosen from the sophomores of English majors in XinjiangUniversity. According to the research, the following questions will be discussed:1.What are the syntactic features of English majors in Xinjiang University in theirwriting?2. What are the differences between the two groups in using the selectedmeasures of syntactic features in their writing?T-test was used in this thesis as a statistical instrument to test the differencesbetween the two groups in using syntax. The results of this study are:1. The syntacticfeatures of the sophomores of English majors in Xinjiang University are: in terms ofsyntax complexity, the composition is too short in length with much more mistakes,besides, only adverbial, objective and attributive clauses were most used; as to variety,loose and periodic sentences were largely used and declarative sentences coveredmost portion of the composition; as for conjunctions, causals and adversatives weremost used.2. The similarities and differences between two groups are: thecompositions from WECCL are much longer in length and with more accuracy thancompositions from Xinjiang University, furthermore, complex sentences and differentkinds of subordinate clauses were much more used; as to similarities, adverbial,objective and attributive clauses were most used in two groups, and loose sentencesand periodic sentences were most used in both groups, also the conjunctions ofcausals and adversatives were frequently used in both groups.The present study touched upon the general syntactic features in English majorsL2writing which exposed some problems existing in EFL students written products.It is suggested that language teachers and learners should raise their awareness of theimportance of syntactic complexity and variety in improving writing proficiency.