| Second Language Acquisition(SLA)research studies the process of learning and language competence of learners.Writing,as an important output,can reflect learners'ability to use language in a flexible and appropriate way.In many studies,language development and writing have been proved to be affected mutually.It means that studying writing is conducive to learning language development or proficiency.And syntactic complexity is one index which can be used to measure the complexity of a passage.Previous studies showed that syntactic complexity is a developmental index that can differentiate levels of proficiency.It could be influenced by various related factors,for instance,genre,planning time and L1 background,and also develop with the improvement of grades.But they did not point out whether syntactic complexity can still be an index to distinguish levels of learners in argumentation.The main reason this study chooses argumentation is that it has been tested in most of exams.It is likely to be practical if studying argumentation.Therefore,this thesis focuses on compositions written by Chinese English major to study syntactic complexity.To be specific,the following research questions are to be listed:1)Whether syntactic complexity still develops with the improvement of grade in argtumentative writing?If it does,which measures show significant difference among the four grades?2)What are the developmental patterns of the measures which show significant differences in argumentative writing?In previous studies,the choices of measures to study on varied from one to one,and their findings were not always consistent.Thus,this study chooses a full range of 14 measures to investigate,including some measures that have been analyzed and others that were suggested by some researchers.The classification of these measures accords to Lu(2011).There are five categories,which are length of production,sentence complexity,subordination,coordination and particular sentences.This thesis select 260 argumentative writings from WELLC,which are written by college students from grade one to grade four.In data analysis,this study analyzes the 14 measures in syntactic complexity of these writing samples with assist of L2SCA and gets the precise data.Then the data of the measures will be counted and using SPSS do the statistics.The research shows:1)some parts of indices of syntactic complexity indeed can distinguish levels of proficiency in argumentation.There are ten of them showing significant differences between levels;2)seven of the ten measures increase linearly from grade 1 to grade 4,and the other three measures progress non linearly.According to the results,there are three measures,which are MLT,CN/T,VP/T and which can differentiate not only adjacent levels but nonadjacent levels.And the other seven measures can only discriminate nonadjacent levels.With respect to the whole development trend,MLC,CN/T,CN/C increase stably and other measures firstly decline from grade 1 to grade 2,then go up from grade 2.Although the increase may not be dramatic,they are indeed on the rise on the whole.The significance of the present study is that it is conducive to studying writing in second language acquisition theoretically and pedagogically.Theoretically,this study intends to investigate syntactic complexity in argumentative writing by considering fourteen measures which is much more comprehensive than the previous studies,and it also can provide referable evidence to confirm syntactic complexity as a developmental index in argumentation.This study will contribute to better understanding of which measures can differentiate levels of L2 proficiency.Meanwhile,this study attempts to summarize the pattern of the development in argumentation.From the pedagogical perspective,this present study focuses on finding out the measures that can differentiate levels of proficiency,which can help learners to make progress in using clauses or sentences in a more flexible way and in their writing skills. |
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