The Linguistic Complexity Of Chinese English Majors In Oral Production:A Four-Year Study

Oral language,an important part of second language competence,has remained a heated topic in second language research in recent years.Therefore,researchers have already done much research concerning fluency and accuracy in oral language.However,less attention has been paid to linguistic complexity in oral production compared with the indexes of fluency and accuracy.Moreover,researchers have investigated factors that may influence oral English as well as how to improve learners’ oral English ability,but there are fewer studies concerning the development of linguistic complexity in oral production than the same topics in written language.Furthermore,among the research on linguistic complexity in oral production,no researcher to date has concentrated on the developmental patterns of students with different language proficiency levels.As a result,this study has adopted both quantitative analysis and item-based analysis to give a comprehensive description of linguistic complexity in oral production for Chinese English majors and students of different language proficiency levels.Through this process,the author aims to discover a general developmental trend of linguistic complexity in oral production and discuss the developmental trend of linguistic complexity in oral production for students of different language proficiency levels.The nineteen subjects of this study come from a natural class at a university located in Shanghai,all majoring in English.All the subjects have taken four oral tests during their four years’ university study with an interval of one year between each test.The general developmental trend of linguistic complexity in oral production and developmental trend of linguistic complexity for students of different language proficiency levels are analyzed after transcription of four oral statistics.Moreover,students’ proficiency levels are differentiated by their performance in TEM-4.The quantitative analysis of linguistic complexity in oral production presents here includes syntactic complexity and lexical complexity.Three indexes of syntactic complexity are employed,namely number of subordinate clauses per C-unit,mean length of subordinate clauses and mean length of C-units.Three indexes are also adopted to analyze lexical complexity:lexical variation,lexical density and lexical sophistication.The Antword software is the primary tool used in the analysis of lexical complexity.And all quantitative analysis in this study is done with the help of SPSS in order to ascertain whether there are any significant differences within participants,oral production over the four years.Secondly,item-based analysis of linguistic complexity in oral production presents herein includes Ravid’s Noun Scale and Pienemann’s Processability Theory;the former is used to analyze participants’ use of abstract nouns and the latter provides insight into their morpho-syntactic development.Based on the above analysis,the major findings of this paper are as follows:1.According to the analysis of linguistic complexity in oral production presented in this paper,students generally make progress in their linguistic complexity over the four years of the study.The number and length of subordinate clauses develop slowly while the length of C-units develops much more significantly;as for lexical complexity,lexical variation and lexical sophistication develop substantially across the four years of the study,while lexical density shows no evident development;Most of the nouns used by all students are classed as Category Five in Ravid’s Noun Scale,generic nouns and among abstract nouns,those within Category Nine,abstract nouns,are preferred in oral production across all years;lastly,in terms of morpho-syntax development,students mature more rapidly at lower stages than at higher stages.2.Upon analyzing the performance of students of different proficiency levels,it is found that different developmental trends are presented over the course of the study.Students of higher proficiency outperform students of lower proficiency in the indexes of mean length of C-units,lexical variation,lexical sophistication,and abstract nouns,as well as the fourth and fifth stages of morpho-syntax development.But this is not the case in the number and length of subordinate clauses or the third stage of morpho-syntax development.