A Study On The Development Of Language Complexity And Accuracy In English Writing And Its Relationship With Writing Quality Of High School Students

In second language acquisition research,the indicators of development of writing ability are mainly accuracy,fluency and complexity.This study focuses on the development of language complexity and accuracy in the writings of senior high school students.At the same time,the correlation between the writing quality assessed by raters and the general language complexity index is investigated.Key to this study was the attempt to link such growth to the ratings of writing quality and language proficiency and to explore whether the scoring criteria for English writing in College Entrance Examination are in line with the language development of senior high school students.In this study,a cross-sectional research was used to collect compositions from Senior 1 to Senior 3 of a key senior high school in Nanchang,and to explore the development trend and characteristics of students' language complexity and accuracy.The subjects were a parallel class from three grades of a key senior high school in Nanchang.There were 50 students in each class in the Senior 1 and Senior 2,and 36 students in the Senior 3.Their compositions were all from Monthly Examination.These compositions were input manually to the computer by the researcher,and the syntactic complexity index and lexical complexity index were analyzed by using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and Range 32 respectively.The accuracy index was calculated manually by the author.The syntactic complexity measures adopted in the present study are mean length of clause(MLC),T-unit complexity ratio(C/T),dependent clause ratio(DC/C),coordinate phrases per T-unit(CP/T)and T-unit per sentence(T/S).The lexical complexity measures were type/token ratio(TTR)and the lexical frequency profile(LFP).The accuracy measure is the ratio of error free T-units(EFT/T).There are three major findings:First,the three-year writing complexity of Chinese high school students has increased significantly in mean length of clause(MLC),dependent clause ratio(DC/C),type/token ratio(TTR)and the lexical frequency profile(LFP).Second,for accuracy,we find that the changes of EFT/T between each grade are not statistically significant,which indicates that students' writing error remains stable over three grades.Third,the data show that six of the language complexity and accuracy features that demonstrated growth in the senior high school students was predictive of human judgments of L2 writing quality.They are lexical complexity(LFP,TTR),accuracy(EFT/T),mean length of clause(MLC),T-unit complexity ratio(C/T)and dependent clause ratio(DC/C).Regression analysis demonstrated that the six indices can explained 50.5% of the variance in the ratings for the writing quality.From a practical perspective,such a finding suggests that writing tasks in College Entrance Examination best assess writing development for senior high school students.Based upon the above findings,the present study has several pedagogical implications for high school English leaners' writing: 1.Writing practice should be attached importance to improve high school students' syntactic complexity in writing.Teachers should help students revise rather than criticize the mistakes they make in order to write long sentences,complex sentences and advanced vocabulary.2.Writing teaching should be carried out in stages.For the Senior 1 learners,teacher should help them express authentically and reduce Chinglish.For the Senior 2 and 3 learners,teacher should pay attention to the spelling.3.Teachers should pay attention to the particularity of the third grade of senior high school,and help students overcome the decline of language complexity and promote the integration of internal language structure at this stage.