A Quantitative Study Of The Syntactic Complexity In Chinese English Majors’Expositions

Writing is one of the most important language outputs. English writing quality can indicatelearners’ ability of communication by using a language. Among the language characteristics ofmeasuring writing quality, syntactic features occupy a very important position. Since the1970smore and more foreign scholars attach importance to syntactic features of second languagewriting and syntactic complexity has also been considered to be one of important measures ofsecond language writing development. Syntactic complexity means writers’ ability to quicklyget and flexibly use various basic and complicated syntactic structures. To investigate syntacticcomplexity in compositions with different qualities, this paper is designed to describe anddiscuss the syntactic complexity in Chinese English majors’ expositions quantitatively. Theresearch data are new added270students’ expositions written by junior English majors inChina in Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Leaners (SWECCL)(2.0). This studydivides these expositions into four groups (the high score group, the high-middle score group,the middle-low score group and the low score group) based on their writing qualities and thenwe extract100expositions with25in each group. This paper will adopt L2SyntacticComplexity Analyzer to analyze the14measures of the syntactic complexity in the100expositions and then use correlation analysis, one–way ANOVA and Post Hoc test in terms ofScheffe to analyze the relationship between writing quality and syntactic complexity, therelationship among the14measures of syntactic complexity and to determine which measurecan significantly discriminate different writing qualities.Through discussions and analyses, we draw the following conclusions. Firstly, the writingquality has no significant correlation with syntactic complexity. Secondly, there is no significantdifference in the14measures of syntactic complexity among the four groups. Finally, there aresignificant correlations among the14measures and the correlations are strong between thosemeasures and other measures belonging to the same type or with the same structures. This papercan reveal the relationship between writing quality and syntactic complexity and the relationship among the fourteen measures of syntactic complexity, which gave the guidance toEnglish writing teaching and rating criteria of English writing.