Measurement Of Syntactic Complexity Of Writings Of Secondary Education EFL Learners

Syntactic complexity is construed generally as the variety and degree of sophistication of the syntactic structures deployed in written production(Bulté &Housen 2014;Lu 2011;Ortega 2003).It has been considered an important construct in second language teaching and research and garnered considerable attention.However,many researchers have not realized that syntactic complexity should be conceptualized and measured as a multi-dimensional construct.And many early studies suffer from problems of small sample sizes and fewer number of measures due to labor-intensiveness of manual analyses and lack of automatically computational tools.In addition,previous studies focused either on college-level EFL learners or college-level ESL learners,while seldom paid attention to secondary education EFL learners.Therefore,the present study investigates syntactic complexity in secondary education EFL learners and sets out to find out(1)whether syntactic complexity differs between high-and low-rated writings,and(2)the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality,and(3)the best syntactic complexity indicator for predicting writing quality.In the current study,14 syntactic complexity measures in the five dimensions of 180 writing samples by the third year students at Lvliang High School were analyzed by the automated computational tool L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(Lu 2010).With obtained data,independent-samples t-tests,Pearson's correlations and linear regression analyses were performed by SPSS to address the three questions.The findings show that(1)high-and low-scored writings display differences in all 14 syntactic complexity measures;but only the number of T-units per sentence(T/S)presents a significant difference,and(2)12 syntactic complexity measureswere found to have positive significant correlation with writing quality and the mean length of sentence(MLS)has the strongest correlation with writing scores,which can be therefore considered as the best indicator for predicating writing quality.But this does not mean that secondary education EFL learners should be encouraged to write longer sentences.This is actually a manifestation of the human rater's perceptions of writing quality,which is also the result of secondary education EFL learners as research subjects who are poorly developed in syntactic complexity than college-level students.Theoretically,the present study has enriched the studies of syntactic complexity.The syntactic complexity in the present study was examined as a multi-dimensional construct using a large set of writing samples.Methodologically,the computational system L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer is employed in the present study to automatically calculate the syntactic complexity analysis enhancing efficiency and higher reliability.This research also provides ESL teachers and researchers with useful insights into how these measures can be used effectively as indices of writings of secondary-level EFL writers.