A Corpus-based Study Of English-majored Students' Syntactic Complexity Development In English Writing

Syntactic complexity,manifested as how varied or sophisticated the production units are(Wolfe-Quintero et.al.1998),has been considered a significant construct reflecting learners' writing development or proficiency.Studies on syntactic complexity development started in 1960 s,mainly aiming to demonstrate how syntactic knowledge develops over time and what syntactic features develops early and later.Recent years,most domestic studies related to this topic,fail to use the full range of measures and lack large-scale learner corpus data,applying only one or few aspects of syntactic complexity metrics.Moreover,many of them target at Chinese English learners in general,without take advanced English learners,represented by English-majored students,into consideration.Therefore,it leaves space for the present study.This study,using both quantitative and qualitative researching methods,aims to contribute to the syntactic complexity research from both theoretical and pedagogical perspective.First of all,theoretically it gives an investigation in features and developmental patterns of syntactic complexity in writings by Chinese English-majored students across three grades,including grade 1,grade 2 and grade 3.Besides,it also tries to figure out the correlation between syntactic complexity and wiring quality in advanced EFL learners represented by grade 3 English-majored learners.Pedagogically,with these findings discovered in the study,it tries to offer useful suggestions for EFL writing learning,instruction and assessment.In the present study,resorting to the 120 written samples from WECCL 2.0(Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners,Wen,Liang and Yan 2008),40 texts were randomly picked from argumentative essays written by each group of English-majored students in Grade 1,Grade 2 and Grade 3.Ten measures of syntactic complexity,classified into length of production unit,amount of subordination,amount of coordination,were employed to quantify features and developmental patterns ofsyntactic complexity as well as the degree of how the syntactic complexity measures predicted writing quality represented by variances of human ratings.Through a detailed investigation,the study has found that 1)English-majored learners significantly differentiate in measures of mean length of T-unit(MLT),mean length of sentence(MLS),dependent clauses per clause(DC/C),dependent clauses per T-unit(DC/T),complex nominals per Clause(CN/C)and complex nominals per T-unit(CN/T);2)English-majored learners from grade 1 to grade 3 demonstrate a significant increasing tendency from grade 1 to grade 3 in the 6 measures which significantly differentiate among English-majored learners across three grades.To be more specifically,mean length of T-unit and sentence only display significant growth between non-adjacent groups of grade 1 and grade 3 rather than any pairs of adjacent grades.DC/C and DC/T,measures of subordination,show more significant growth between grade 2 and grade 3 instead of that between grade 1 and grade 2 while CN/C and CN/T,measures of the degree of phrasal sophistication,significantly increase between adjacent groups of grade 1 and grade 2 while increasing with an insignificant margin between grade 2 and grade 3;3)mean length of T-unit(MLT),complex nominals per clause(CN/C)and complex nominals per T-unit(CN/T)display significant correlation with writing quality of samples written by grade 3 learners while only CN/T display moderate correlation with writing quality.This study intends to provide English-majored learners and teachers with implications of learning,teaching and evaluation suggestions,paying more attention to the significant role of the degree of phrasal sophistication which both significantly differentiate among English-majored learners across three grades and correlate with writing quality of writing samples in grade 3 learners.Therefore,for one part,in English writing learning,English majored students should learn to employ more complex nominals in their writings;for another,in English writing instruction and assessment,teachers are supposed to encourage students to use more complex nominals and lay emphasis on the degree of Phrasal sophistication when doing writing evaluation.