A Contrastive Study On Syntactic Complexity In Writing Of Chinese And American High School Students

As syntactic complexity, also called syntactic maturity refers to the range of forms that surface in language production and the degree of sophistication of such forms (Bao, 2009; Ortega,2003). Recent years, syntactic complexity, as one of the key dimensions to measure second learners’ language proficiency, has aroused the general interests of researchers abroad and at home. Although these researchers have studied the characteristics and development trends in syntactic complexity of second language learners from various perspectives, there still exist problems like limited syntactic complexity measures involved and small size of analysis samples. What’s more, most of the previous studies investigated the features of syntactic complexity in college-levels, but little attention has been paid to the syntactic complexity of high school students. Meanwhile, comparisons of syntactic complexity between second language learners and native speaker are rare to see. Therefore, the present study will contrast writing of Chinese and native high school students and find differences and similarities in their syntactic complexity.The present study collected 200 compositions from Chinese high school students to form a learner corpus, and another 50 compositions from American high school students as native speakers corpus. The present study used L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2011) to analyze the corpora for 14 syntactic complexity measures in terms of length of production units, sentence complexity, subordination, coordination and phrasal sophistication. First, a comparison between native and non-native is done to test whether there is any difference in the writings of NNS and NS high school students’ on five areas of syntactic complexity. Second, the learner corpus is divided into two proficiency groups according to the holistic score of each composition. This study further explores the potential differences on syntactic complexity between high- and low- proficiency groups and whether Chinese students at the higher proficiency level approach the native high school students significantly better than students at lower proficiency level.Results of the present study are as follows:1) There are differences in syntactic complexity between the writing of NNS and NS high school students. The differences reaches statistical significances in terms of length of production units, sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and phrasal sophistication, which indicates that compared with native speakers, Chinese high school students is generally underdeveloped in syntactic complexity.2) In terms of the length of production units (MLS, MLT, MLC), students at high-proficiency group perform significantly better than those in the low-proficiency group, but both of them were significantly lower than native high school students. Sentence complexity measures by C/S, displays a significant growth from the low-proficiency group to high-proficiency group, but there is still a significant gap with the native group. With respect to the degree of subordination, the high-proficiency group outperforms the low-proficiency group on C/T, CT/T, DC/C, DC/T, while the high-proficiency group has reached the same level with native high school students on all the four subordination measures. Students in high and low proficiency groups don’t show any significant difference in CP/C, CP/T, T/S, but both of them are significantly lower than native group on all three coordination measures. Finally, the results also show that the high-proficiency group differs significantly from the low-proficiency group on CP/C, CP/T, VP/T, but they are still far from native speakers competent use of these three measures of phrasal sophistication.Base on the findings in this study, there are some recommendations on high school teaching for English in China. Taking the unsatisfactory performance of syntactic complexity into consideration, English subject should add more training on syntactic complexity and encourage students to use more complex sentence patterns rather than simple sentences.