A Study On Syntactic Complexity Of Writings By High School Students

In recent years, researchers both at home and abroad have applied different indices of syntactic complexity to study syntactic complexity and its development of ESL learners. However, researchers often pay special emphasis on complexity of syntactic structures, neglecting diversity of sentence patterns. Moreover, most of the studies on syntactic complexity take college-level students as subjects, whereas studies on syntactic complexity displayed by high school students are hard to be found. Given the aforementioned situation, this study, quantitative in nature, aims to probe into the following questions:1) What is the developmental trend for high school students in terms of syntactic complexity?2) What kind of relationship can be found between syntactic complexity and writing quality among high school students?3) What implications could be concluded to foster the writing teaching in high school environment?Results of present study are as follows:1) As students moving to higher grade level, the means for length of production units, complexity ratios and dependent clause types all show a tendency of increase. The frequency of complex sentences increases despite the fact that simple sentences remain the major sentences used in students’writings. The frequency of compound sentences first experiences a decrease and is followed by an increase.2) Syntactic complexity is positively correlated with writing quality and the mean values for syntactic complexity indices of high performance group are generally higher than those of low performance groups.3) Findings of present study provide high school English teaching with important implications that in the process of writing teaching, teachers should not only pay attention to content abundance and language accuracy but also place great emphasis on syntactic choices and encourage students to use more complex structures in replacement of simple sentences.