| The most important tool for teachers to carry out teaching activities and improve the quality of teaching is the English textbook,which is also the major learning material for students to broaden the range of knowledge and improve their English skills.Thus,the selection of English textbooks at appropriate difficulty level is significant for teachers and students as well as English teaching.In addition,the College Entrance Examination is one of the qualifications for candidates to choose and enter a highly good university.It is a vital method to evaluate students' learning effect in high school as well.Therefore,as one of the major subjects of the College Entrance Examination,English plays a crucial role in the education of Chinese students.Thereby,the syntactic complexity analysis of the texts of National Matriculation English Test(NMET)papers is helpful for teachers to understand the syntactic difficulty of the texts and also helps students better prepare for the exam.Meanwhile,in order to promote the optimization of the difficulty level of textbooks,strengthen the combination of teaching and examination and improve the consistency between them,the research on the difference of syntactic complexity between English textbooks and NMET papers is necessary.At present,domestic and foreign scholars' research on English textbooks mainly focuses on vocabulary,lexical and cultures,and also investigates its readability.However,there are not enough studies on syntactic complexity of high school English textbooks.It is even rare to compare the texts of Chinese high school English textbooks and NMET papers on syntactic complexity.Therefore,this study will present a comparative analysis of the English textbook Advance with English and NMET papers used in Jiangsu Province from the perspective of syntactic complexity.Syntactic complexity is used to describe the complexity and diversity of sentence structure in language production,and is also an important indicator for evaluating the level of language development.Syntactic complexity covers many aspects,including length of production unit,coordinate structure,subordinate structure,nominalization,and T-unit.With the development of linguistic research,researchers have proposeddozens of measures for analyzing syntactic complexity,and modern software for automatic analysis of syntactic complexity has been developed by researchers to help push on related research progress and improve the accuracy.So for this study,the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA),as a data processing tool,will be applied to deal with syntactic complexity measures.The analyzer can automatically calculate the14 syntactic complexity measures in five dimensions including length of production units,the range of sentence complexity,the amount of subordination or coordination and the degree of phrasal sophistication.The research of the paper devotes to answer the following three research questions:(1)What are the characteristics of syntactic complexity of reading texts in the English textbooks used in high schools of Jiangsu province?(2)What are the characteristics of syntactic complexity of reading passages in National Matriculation English Test(NMET)papers in Jiangsu province?(3)What are the differences of reading texts in English textbooks and reading passages in National Matriculation English Test(NMET)papers on syntactic complexity?The results of the comparative analysis between English textbooks and NMET papers show:(1)The syntactic complexity level of Advance with English basically increases with the increase of the grade,but the measures of syntactic complexity among different modules do not arrange from the level of easiness to difficulty.Among the reading texts of different grades and modules,there are six measures showing significant differences(MLC,MLS,MLT,CP/C,CN/C and CN/T);(2)There is no significant difference in the syntactic complexity of NMET papers from different years.At the same time,the 14 syntactic complexity measures from Passage A to D in the test papers are not arranged in order from easy to difficult.Among the different texts of the test papers,there are five measures showing significant differences(MLC,CT/T,CP/C,CP/ T and C/S);(3)On the whole,most measurements of syntactic complexity of the English textbooks texts are lower than that of NMET papers.Specifically,the syntactic complexity between English textbooks of Grade 1 and NMET papers mainly differs inthe length of production unit(MLC,MLS and MLT),coordination(CP/C)and phrasal sophistication(CN/C,CN/T and VP/T),and reflects in MLS,MLT,CN/C and CN/T between Grade 2 and NMET papers.Compared with Grade 1 and 2,textbooks of Grade 3 have only two measures(MLT and CN/T)the same as the former.Besides,there are two more measures(C/T and T/S)that are significantly different from NMET papers.However,among the three grades,the syntactic complexity of texts of Grade 3 has the highest mean value of each measure,which also has the smallest difference compared with NMET papers.Therefore,the syntactic complexity of English textbooks of Grade 3 and NMET papers are the most consistent.Based on these conclusions,this study put forward some corresponding suggestions for the selection and compilation of textbooks.Under the premise of meeting the requirements of the syllabus,the textbook writers should also consider the syntactic complexity of the texts while considering the difficulty of the textbook content.And the high school English textbooks need to be somewhat syntactically complex with NMET papers to strengthen the combination of teaching and testing,and improve the consistency between them.Moreover,students themselves should also strengthen extracurricular reading while learning the textbooks in class well to expand their vocabulary,improve their reading skills and better prepare for the College Entrance Examination. |
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