A Corpus-based Study On The Syntactic Complexity Of English Writing By Junior High School Students

Syntactic complexity,also known as syntactic maturity or language complexity,refers to the variation and sophistication of language forms in language production.Previous research results show that syntactic complexity is an effective indicator to measure language development,second language proficiency and writing quality.English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022)emphasizes that writing is an essential part of language skills and an expressive skill that students must master.With the reform of Senior High School Entrance Examination,the proportion and scores of writings are on the rise.Under this background,it is particularly important to explore the developmental features of junior high school students’ syntactic complexity and the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing achievement in order to feedback English teaching practice and improve students’ English writing achievements.However,most of the existing studies focused on medium and advanced English learners,such as college students,there is almost no research using large-scale corpus to explore the developmental features of syntactic complexity in junior high school students’ English writing and the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing achievement based on a certain theory.Based on above research background,this research takes Language Exposure Hypothesis as theoretical foundation and adopts a longitudinal research method.Taking 54 students in Grade 9 from a middle school in Hohhot,Inner Mongolia as the research subjects,in total 162 time-limited compositions of three mid-term exams from Grade 7 to Grade 9 were collected to build a corpus with three sub-corpora for the sake for exploring the developmental features of syntactic complexity in junior high school students’ English writing and the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing achievement.The present research mainly probes into the following two research questions:(1)What are the developmental features of syntactic complexity in junior high school students’ English writing?(2)What is the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing achievement in junior high school students’ English writing? An automatic tool called L2 SCA is employed to assess the syntactic complexity values of each composition in terms of four measurement dimensions,namely length of production unit,amount of subordination,amount of coordination and degree of phrasal sophistication.These statistical results are put into SPSS26.0 for One-way ANOVA and Repeated Contrasts.Spearman Correlation Analysis is used to test the relationship between syntactic complexity and English writing achievement as well.Through detailed analysis,the major findings are presented as follows.(1)The developmental features of the four dimensions in syntactic complexity are asynchronous and unbalanced,and these findings are consistent with Language Exposure Hypothesis.Specially,indicators of the length of production unit all show upward trends,indicating that students’ ability to express long sentences is gradually improved;The amount of subordination is on the rise,which indicates that students’ complexity of syntactic structure is enhanced;In terms of coordination,the use of coordinate phrases has increased significantly,while the use of coordinate sentences shows a U-shaped trend,indicating that students’ ability to change sentence patterns has gradually improved;In terms of degree of phrasal sophistication,the use of complex nominals is increasing gradually,which indicates that students develop gradually from initial level to intermediate level and advanced level.(2)The relationships between the length of production unit and writing achievement,the number of subordination and writing achievement,the number of coordinate phrase and writing achievement and the degree of phrasal sophistication and writing achievement are all medium,positive and significant;The relationship between the number of coordinate sentences and writing achievement is weak,negative and not significant.Based on the research findings,the researcher put forward some implications for future English writing teaching and English writing assessment.From the perspective of English writing teaching,the explicit teaching of indicators in syntactic complexity should be paid attention so as to improve students’ syntactic awareness;Teachers could make some targeted tasks to strengthen students’ syntactic complexity practice;And students should be encouraged to use more complex syntactic structures in order to further improve their English writing achievement.From the perspective of English writing assessment,indicators of syntactic complexity can give some reference to the criteria for marking compositions of the Senior High School Entrance Examination(SHSEE)and ordinary examinations so that teachers and students could pay more attention to syntactic complexity.