A Study On Lexical And Syntactic Complexity Development Of Chinese English Majors' Writings

Second language(henceforth L2)writing complexity,often along with accuracy and fluency(CAF),has been investigated as an important indicator of EFL learner's writing proficiency development.Despite the fact that there is a large body of researches on L2 writing complexity development,there still are limitations shared by most previous studies.First,the scale of previous studies on learners' writing complexity tend to be rather small,with limited writing samples examined by few measures focusing exclusively on lexical or syntactic complexity which fails to provide a comprehensive overview of learners' complexity development.Second,L2 complexity per se was rarely scrutinized as a multidimensional system since researchers often simply reduce complexity to its measures thus the results produced by different researches were often not comparable.Third,for previous studies investigating the writing complexity of Chinese EFL learners,task variables such as genre,timing-condition,writing prompt,text length were not satisfactorily controlled which decreased the reliability of the reported findings.This study investigates the writing complexity development of Chinese English majors with a quantitative approach under Bulté & Housen's(2012)theoretical framework of L2 complexity.The source of Chinese English majors' writing samples is the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners Version 2.0(WECCL 2.0)(Wen et al.2008)from which a total of 419 argumentative writings were collected with strictly controlled variables(genre,year of admission,grade,major,text-length,timing-condition and writing prompt).Besides,80 argumentative timed writing samples by native speakers of English with similar text length were collected from Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)(Granger,2003)as a reference corpus.Writing samples from the two corpora were examined from two aspects,namely lexical and syntactic complexity,with a wide range of measures to get a fuller understanding of the development pattern of Chinese English majors' writing complexity and,hopefully,offer useful suggestions for both EFL learners and curricular designers.This study has revealed that Chinese English majors' writing complexity development is characterized by following features:With respect to lexical complexity,1)the lexical density of writings of Chinse English majors increases in a fast and consistent manner and upperclassmen's lexical density has even reached that of native speakers;2)the lexical sophistication development is characterized by lower initial value and higher growth rates at lower grades and stagnation at higher grades where a major gap still exists between native speakers and Chinese English major seniors;3)Chinese English majors' lexical diversity has developed to a more balanced distribution featuring lower frequent word diversity and higher less-frequent word diversity for students of higher grade levels.As regard syntactic complexity,1)Chinese English majors' writings show a generally upward trend in the length of production units,especially in terms of the length of clauses,which has basically reached the same level as native speakers of English;2)there is also an observed transformation of the strategy of complexification from coordination to subordination,despite the fact that the amount of subordination of writings of Chinese English majors of all grades is still significantly lower than that of native speakers;3)the use of complex nominals and prepositional phrases shows consistent and linear growth across four grades: upperclassmen show a near-native use of prepositional phrases while in terms of complex nominals there are still gaps to be fill between native speakers and Chinese English majors.Overall,the development of Chinese English majors' lexical and syntactic complexity possesses following characteristics: In the first place,both the lexical and syntactic complexity of Chinese English majors' writings generally approximate that of native speakers by showing higher lexical density,higher proportion of less frequent words,more balanced word diversity,longer production units,more frequent occurrence of subordination and increasing reliance on prepositional phrases and complex nominals.Secondly,it was found that the lexical and syntactic complexity of Chinese English majors' writings developed in an asynchronous way as lexical complexity development emerges generally before syntactic complexity.Finally,Chinese English major learners show different development trajectories in different aspects of linguistic complexity as there has been observed rapid growth,stagnation and retrogression in distinct aspects and at different stages of linguistic complexity development.