A Study On The Lexical And Syntactic Complexity Of Argumentative Writing By Chinese Doctoral Students

As far as L2writing is concerned, complexity plays an integral part in its assessment. A great deal of research has been done on the two aspects of complexity-lexical and syntactic, but few of them look into doctoral students’writings. Therefore, this study aims to find out the features of the lexical and syntactic complexity of doctoral students’ writings by means of various measures and how these measures are related with the overall writing quality.Altogether60argumentative writings composed by PhD candidates from over20departments of Nanjing University were analyzed with the help of two web-based automatic Analyzers. After investigating the results of25lexical complexity measures and14syntactic complexity measures, the study yields the following findings.Firstly, doctoral students’ writings achieved relatively high lexical density, but the lexical sophistication of these writings was at medium level. In terms of lexical variation, the lexical complexity of doctoral students’ writing samples was generally high, especially for NDW and its relevant measures. Among other lexical variation measures, only a few measures were a little low. As for syntactic complexity measures, language samples in this study possessed relatively long production units; their sentence complexity, subordination and coordination were at medium level, but texts differed notably in sentence complexity and all four subordination measures as well as two coordination measures. When syntactic complexity was examined in terms of particular structures, the percentage of complex nominals was rather high while that of verb phrases was only at medium level.When it comes to the relationship between different complexity measures and overall writing quality, lexical sophistication had the strongest effect on the writing quality. Verb sophistication and its two transformations could clearly differentiate between writings by learners from different score groups while all lexical variation measures failed to do so. None of the14syntactic complexity measures exhibited significant correlations with overall writing quality, nor could they separate writings from various score groups.This study boasts both theoretical and practical implications. Theoretically, this study probes into doctoral students’ writings which were seldom touched upon in previous studies. Additionally, by giving clear definitions and automating data analysis, it manages to obtain and compare the results of quite a few complexity measures. Practically, for EFL learners, they should bear in mind that more complexity does not necessarily guarantee high scores for their writing. However, by using more diversified verbs, they are more likely to achieve higher scores than by simply writing sentences with more complex structures. As for instructors, they should emphasize the importance of combining simple and complex sentences and raise learners’ awareness of verb variety.