The Development And Interaction Of Complexity,accuracy And Fluency In Academic English Writing

As students’ academic English writing competence has attracted more and more attention in universities,academic English writing becomes a research focus.However,most of the current researches focus on teaching methods and needs analysis,only some of them pay attention to academic English texts,with cross-sectional study being used as the major research design.And there are still research gaps in the development process of academic English writing ability.Therefore,in order to gain a more comprehensive and concrete view of students’ academic English writing development,the present research applies dynamic longitudinal methods to describe the developmental paths of lexical complexity,syntactic complexity,accuracy and fluency in learners’ writings and to explore the interaction patterns between the sub-systems from the perspective of complex dynamic systems theory,and semi-structured interviews are conducted to better understand and reveal the factors that affect the development and interaction.In this study,ten volunteers were first recruited from the “Academic English Writing” class.They were required to complete the reading tasks every week and writing tasks every two weeks.At the end of the semester,3 volunteers who withdrew halfway or did not complete the task were eliminated.CET-6 scores were referred,and the 3 volunteers with the lowest score,the average score,and the highest score were chosen as the final participants.L,C and Z represented low-proficiency,middle-proficiency and high-proficiency level respectively.They were required to submit a reaction paper every two weeks within a semester and then they would receive feedbacks from the researcher.The lexical complexity was measured by the mean sophisticated type-token ratio(MSTTR);the syntactic complexity was measured by the number of complex nominal phrases per T-units(CN/T);the fluency was measured by words per T-units;the accuracy was measured by error-free T-unit ratio.MSTTR and CN/T were calculated by virtue of L2SCA(Lu,2010),and the fluency and accuracy were calculated manually.The data was quantitatively analyzed with a series of CDST methods to demonstrate general development,detect sudden jump and anomalous variance.Qualitative data of interview and feedback was used to reveal the divergence in the process.After that,through the Z-score graph and moving correlation,the CAF in participants’ academic English writings were further analyzed to observe the dynamic interaction between the four indices.The main findings of this research are as follows.Students in these three proficiency levels exhibit nonlinear developmental paths and a high degree of variability in CAF,containing both progression and attrition.Second,students with different levels of proficiency show different developmental trends in the four indices.Low-proficiency and middle-proficiency students show greater fluctuations and experience more stage changes in the process.Third,the interactions of the four indices are in dynamic changes over time.For low-proficiency students,there exists a supportive relation between MSTTR and CN/T,MSTTR and fluency;for middle-proficiency students,the relation between MSTTR and accuracy,and CN/T and fluency are supportive;for high-proficiency students,the relation between MSTTR and accuracy remains competitive,while MSTTR and fluency shows supportive relation.The findings provide some important methodological and pedagogical implications for future academic English writing researches.For researchers,CDST has significant advantages in revealing the developmental trajectories and interactional patterns of different dimensions in academic English writing,and could be used as an effective paradigm.Besides,teachers can gain some effective suggestions on designing corresponding training programs based on students’ personal situation and providing students with timely teaching intervention in various ways so that students may achieve an optimal level in CAF in academic English writing.