Studies On The Developmental Use Of Subject And Object In High School Students’ L2 Writings

Under the framework of Dependency Grammar, this corpus-based study investigated the developmental features of L2 syntactic performance in the writings by Chinese EFL learners during the six-year middle and high school, focusing on the major syntactic relations, i.e., the ones presented by subject and object.The data of this study comes from 342 timed compositions on different topics by 342 middle and high school students from G1 to G6 in eight junior high schools and five senior high Schools in one province. All the compositions are inputted into the computer, processed and tagged. After that, raw corpus and annotated corpus are built for further analysis. Stanford Parser is used as the tool for the annotation and analysis of the data. Excel and SPSS are adopted to process the statistical analyses of the data.The major findings of the current study are:1) Chinese middle and high school students’ L2 syntactic performance in writing display noticeable progress with the increase of their grade level, but the development is not in a linear pattern; 2) the decrease of the overall mean dependency distance reflects that students in G4 present a plateau phenomenon; 3) the language in writings by Chinese middle and high school students is a governor-final one; 4) In terms of subject-related dependency, students in higher grades present less subject-related dependency and tend to show more syntactic errors rather than lexical ones; 5) In terms of object-related dependency, the higher grades the students are in, the more object-related dependency they display; 6) By calculating the dependency distance of subject and object, it is found out that the subject-related one is governor-final, while the object-related one is governor-initial.This study further discussed the implications provided by the above-mentioned findings and proposed some suggestions for the teaching and learning of syntactic knowledge. It is also hoped that this study would shed some light on future instruction of and research on syntactic knowledge and writing of Chinese EFL learners in middle and high schools even in colleges.