A Dependency Treebank-based Research On The Syntactic Complexity In Chinese EFL Learners’ Writings:A Developmental Perspective

This treebank-based study investigated how the syntactic complexity develops in Chinese EFL learners’writings based on dependency grammar during eight-year English learning through a quasi-longitudinal approach.The data of this study comes from 341 English compositions by Chinese students of eight grades,from grade one of junior high school to grade two in university.All the writings are inputted into the computer,processed,tagged and merged to form a treebank based on dependency grammar for further analysis.In the treatment of corpus data,a number of instruments such as Stanford Parser 3.6.0 and Altmann Fitter 3.1.0 are used.In addition,for the statistical analyses of the data,SPSS 20.0 and Microsoft Excel 2007 are employed.The major findings are:1)The overall mean dependency distance(MDD)increases significantly along with the growth of grades across eight years,but a noticeable drop of MDD can be observed at the third year of senior high school,which indicates the syntactic complexity in Chinese EFL learners’ English writings increases significantly along with the growth of grades across eight years with a decrease at grade three of senior high school.2)The overall MDD gradually increases and reaches a steady state in university and the MDD in English writings by Chinese sophomores is close to the level of English native speakers.3)Like native speakers,foreign language learners also obey Zipf’s Principle of Least Effort and avoid using dependency relations of long distance which may cause more cognitive cost.4)With the increase of grades,there are fewer and fewer adjacent dependency relations,and more and more dependency relations of long dependency distances in Chinese EFL learners’ L2 writings,but the adjacent dependency relations and dependency relations with longer dependency distances present the opposite variations at grade three of senior high school.5)Along with the growth of Chinese EFL’s grades,the syntactic complexity of the subjects,objects,adverbials and attributes in their English writings all increases,which contributes to the overall syntactic complexity of their English writings.6)The nouns and pronouns work together on the growth of the MDD of subjects.The nouns and clauses play a role in the rise of the MDD of objects.The adverbs and adverbial clauses have a positive effect on the increases of the MDD of adverbials.The attributive clause is the biggest contributor to the growth of the MDD of attributes.7)Students’ syntactic complexity keeps increasing when they keep receiving new English language structures or English grammar.However,once students stop receiving the new input at grade three of senior high school,the syntactic complexity in their writings stops improving.8)After learning a new syntactic structure,especially a complex syntactic structure,students can’t master it at once,but master it gradually,and students’ mastery degree of the new syntactic structure keeps improving with the growing of their English proficiency.9)As for some language structures,Chinese English learners’ mastery degree is low all the time.It is concluded that these findings would shed some light on future study on the syntactic acquisition of second language.It is also hoped that the findings of this study would provide some pedagogical implications for the purpose of improving the syntactic teaching in China.