A Comparative Study On Language Complexity Development Of English Majors In Narrative And Expository Writing

In the study of second language writing,because the complexity of sentences and vocabulary diversity are important criteria for measuring the quality of a composition,complexity has become an important indicator for evaluating the development of written language in second language learners.This study used the longitudinal method to track the development of language complexity of English major in narrative and expository writing for two years.This study aims to explore the complexity development trend and genre differences in complexity of English majors between expository and narrative writing through the 2 years of longitudinal study on their writing.The participants are 20 undergraduate students from a college in Jiangxi who are selected from two natural classes of English majors.They were required to write both expository and narrative writings in each semester of first two years of university.We examined the complexity development trend,and compared the genre differences of writing in the fourth semester.The total number of samples is 120 essays.After the data was collected,these materials were input into L2 SCA to analyze the value of syntactic complexity(the number of clauses per T-unit(C/T),the number of dependent clauses per clause(DC/C),complex nominals such as CN/C,CN/T)and lexical richness(the type-token ratio TTR)in lexical complexity.Besides,these materials also were entered into Range 23 to analyze the value of lexical frequency profile(LFP).After obtaining the data,the corresponding complexity value was entered into SPSS 23.0 to do analysis and statistics using independent sample T test and Friedman test.This study drew the following major findings:1)Through two years of study,there are significant development trends in the complex nouns(CN/C,CN/C)among the four indicators of the syntactic complexity of narrative and expository writing,and there is no significant development trend in the number of clauses(C/T,DC/C).In terms of lexical complexity,TTR has shown a tendency of retrogression in both expository and narrative writing;LFP has not shown a development trend in narration,but in expository writing,it is in a declining trend influenced by the difficulty of writing topics,familiarity,test and alignment effect.2)In terms of genre differences,it can be seen that the means of CN/T and CN/Cin expository writing are greater than the narration,and there are significant genre differences in CN/C and CN/T.With regard to lexical complexity,there is no significant genre difference in TTR and LFP.In addition,the study also found that there is significant relationship between writing quality and genre.The implications of the above findings for language teaching are:1)Since C/T and DC/C have no significant development trend through two years of learning,teachers need to pay attention to the cultivation of students' ability to use complex clauses and encourage students to write more complex sentences.2)Since TTR shows a trend of retrogression,teachers should pay special attention to the development of students' vocabulary diversity and richness.3)Teachers should pay attention to the use of students' intermediate frequency and low frequency words to improve the use of language vocabulary.4)Teachers should consider the genre difference in writing teaching,and arrange different teaching activities according to actual requirements.