A Corpus-based Developmental Study Of Syntactic Complexity In Chinese English Majors'argumentative Writings

Second Language (L2) writing is one of the significant facets of Second Language Acquisition (SLA),and syntactic complexity is one of the important manifestations in L2 writing. This study is based on a diachronic corpus and employs the method of the combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the trajectory of syntactic complexity in the timed argumentative writings of 79 Chinese English majors across three years. This study adopts three measures to gauge the syntactic complexity, namely, length of production (MLT and MLC); embeddedness (C/T and DC/C); and particular structures (CN/T and VP/T). The results yielded from this study indicate that the developmental pattern of syntactic complexity is rather complicated. In terms of length of production, it reveals the basically linearly increasing developmental tendency;as for the embeddedness,it shows the descending tendency with fluctuation; and with respect to particular structures, it demonstrates the increasing tendency with fluctuation. This study tries to interpret the above phenomena with a Dynamic Systems Theory (DST) approach and testifies that there are attractor state and repellor state during the development, and the shift from the one to the other accounts for the changes. Furthermore, this study provides some pedagogical implications for syntactic teaching in L2 writing.