A Study Of Sentence Variety In L2 Writing

English writing begins with sentences.In addition to common measures of accuracy,fluency,and complexity of sentences,writing proficiency is also exemplified by sentence variety,which requires the ability to employ a wide range of sentences of varied lengths and types to achieve the appropriateness of meaning conveyed and stylistic effect.Existing research nevertheless seldom focuses on the features of sentence variety in actual texts,and ESL teachers and students are even less aware of what features are indicative of sentence variety in mature writing.With this understanding,this study investigates how the advanced Chinese college-level students and expert English writers manipulate their sentence variety in English argumentative writing.The current study aims to address the following two questions:1)Have the advanced Chinese ESL students reached the same level in sentence length variety as expert English writers?If not,how and why they differ?2)Have they reached the same level in sentence type variety as expert English writers?If not,how and why they differ?In order to accomplish this,200 argumentative essays are collected for comparison of their use in sentence lengths and types.One corpus is composed of 100 Chinese College Students' Compositions(CCSC)and the other consists of 100 essays from College English Textbooks(CET).In analyzing the first 500 words in each text,the automatic tool ProWritingAid is used to identify the individual sentence length and calculate the number of extra-short,short,medium,long and extra-long sentences;extracting 40 samples from each corpus for manual sentence type annotation,this study gathers the number of four grammatical and two rhetorical sentence types,as well as that of run-on sentences and sentence fragments in CCSC corpus.Through quantitative approaches to the range and frequency of the data combined with qualitative analyses,the findings are summed up as follows:1)Advanced Chinese ESL students have reached the same level as expert English writers in using a wide range of sentences of varied lengths,but in terms of frequency,more extra-short and short sentences are presented in their compositions.By contrast,the number of long sentences is significantly insufficient which indicates their inability to dawn upon evidence to support the argument.Besides,they tend to heavily use the same category of embedded clauses which reduces the readability,and exhibit less concern about juxtaposing shorter and longer sentences for stylistic effects.2)Advanced Chinese ESL students fail to reach the same level in both range and frequency of using a variety of grammatical sentence types as expert writers.To be specific,compound sentence is their least preferred sentence type and more simple and complex sentences are presented in their writing,indicating a colloquial tendency.No significant difference is found in their use of rhetorical sentence types,but more loose and fewer periodic sentences make their information not compact enough.Additionally,Chinese ESL students may occasionally be interfered by their first language,exemplified mainly by the misuse of commas and subordinators of "because" and "while".The findings suggest that,in general,the writing of advanced Chinese ESL students does not reach the same level of sentence variety as writing from textbooks.For one thing,students need more practice in writing long and compound sentences;for another,it is of importance to manipulate their sentences on rhetorical level including position and function of various sentences to reinforce the expression of meaning and make their writing more reader responsible.Accordingly,teachers of ESL writing are supposed to provide more examples and guidelines concerning how sentence variety influences the communication between the writer and readers as well as the written style.