A Longitudinal Study Of The Development Of Syntactic Complexity Of English Majors’ Writings

The study of syntactic complexity of L2 writing abroad could date back to the 1930s while such research at home comparatively lagged behind. In recent years, the study of syntactic complexity of L2 writing in China is growing popular with the development of corpus linguistics. However, among those studies, most of them are cross-sectional studies. Besides, the measures used in measuring syntactic complexity in L2 writing are limited to those frequently used abroad such as T-unit length, clause length, T-unit complexity and dependent clause ratio. This study adopted 14 measures to study the syntactic complexity of L2. writing-based on 88 writings by 11 grade 2 students of English major over about one-year study expecting to have some implications for English writing learning and teaching.This study focused on three questions:1) Over one-year study, what changes do the 11 participants have in 14 syntactic complexity measures of their writings?2) Over one-year study, what are the features of students’English writing developmental trajectory in terms of syntactic complexity?3) Over one-year study, what are the differences and similarities among different proficiency groups?The results showed:1) Over one-year study, among 14 measures of 11 students’ writings, only 3 of them:the ratio of sentence to clause, the ratio of dependent clause to T-unit and the ratio of complex nominals to clause (C/S, DC/T, CN/C) showed significant difference, which is different from previous studies.2) As for the features of students’English writing developmental trajectory,6 out of 14 measures, mean length of sentences, mean length of T-unit, the ratio of clause to sentence, the ratio of clause to T-unit, the ratio of dependent clause to T-unit and the ratio of verb phrases to T-unit (MLS, MLT, C/S, C/T, DC/T, VP/T), showed upward trend and mean length of clauses, the ratio of T-unit to sentence, the ratio of dependent clause to clause, the ratio of complex T-unit to T-unit (MLC, T/S, DC/C, CT/T) downward trend, which is similar to Xiaofei Lu’s (2011) study. However, mean length of T-unit(MLT) didn’t present obvious upward or downward trend.3) This study divided all 11 students into three proficiency groups, i.e., high-proficiency group, middle-proficiency group and low-proficiency group. Over one-year study, the significant difference of mean length of T-unit(MLT), mean length of sentence(MLS), and the ratio of complex T-unit to T-unit CT/T was shown between high-proficiency group and low-proficiency group and that of mean length of sentences (MLS) and the ratio of complex nominals to clause(CN/C) was shown between high-proficiency group and middle-proficiency group.Based on the longitudinal study and the expansion of syntactic complexity measures, this study had some new findings and brought about some pedagogical implications:first, writing teachers should change the evaluation criteria. Judging students’ writings cannot just be conducted from the perspective of long sentences and difficult sentences; second, teachers should guide students to use complex sentence patterns, words or phrases to express their opinions; third, when teaching writing, teachers should try to remind students of observing the changes of sentences in their writings. However, this study just lasts one year and the changes of syntactic complexity measures in students’ writings are limited. Therefore, in the future study of syntactic complexity of English writing, the research results will be more convincing if the period of study can be longer.