A Study On Linguistic Features And Communicative Adequacy Of Chinese Secondary EFL Learners' Writing

This study provides a fine-grained description of linguistic features (complexity, accuracy and fluency, CAF) and communicative adequacy (coherence) in Chinese secondary EFL learners'writing. Specifically, the study applied both CAF analysis and coherence analysis to 90 Chinese high school students'argumentative essays that were divided into high level group, medium level group and low level group according to composition scores. Data were sampled from argumentative essays produced by participants from 16 high schools in Beijing in the project "English Language Use Ability Development of High School Graduates in Beijing". The study also sampled 30 argumentative essays from the sub-corpus British Pupil's A-level essays of the Louvain University Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) to serve as baseline data. By comparative analysis, the study revealed the characteristics of Chinese secondary EFL learners'writing, to examine whether and to what extent the three Chinese groups differ and to explore the way Chinese high level group differs from native speakers of the same age. After data processing and statistical analysis, the following findings were generated.When it comes to syntactic complexity, the study found that Chinese high level group produced significantly longer sentence, T-unit and clause, more coordination and subordination, more complex sentence, more clause types and more non-finite structures than the other two groups. Compared to NS group, the production unit length, coordination, non-finite structures of Chinese high level group was significantly lower.When it comes to lexical complexity, high level group performed better in lexical variation and lexical sophistication than the other two groups. When comparing with NS group, lexical density, lexical variation and the proportion of beyond-2000 words of Chinese high level group is significantly lower.In terms of accuracy, high level group wrote more accurately, but there was no significant difference between the medium and low level groups.As for fluency, high level group wrote significantly more fluently than the other two groups; medium level group also can produce significantly more words than low level group.In regard to Coherence, learners of higher proficiency wrote more cohesively. As for thematic progression patterns, learners of higher proficiency adopted more Linear progression. In terms of rhetorical structure, essays by higher proficiency leaners were more argumentative. Compared with NS group, there was no significant difference in total amount of cohesive devices. Chinese learners'essays were less argumentative than native speaker' in terms of rhetorical structure relations.In terms of correlations among complexity, accuracy, fluency and coherence, this study found that relatively higher correlations existed between lexical complexity and accuracy as well as between accuracy and fluency. Generally, high level group did better in balancing the three aspect and low level group mainly struggled to balance accuracy and other aspects. As for the relationship between linguistic and communicative features, the study found that generally the development of the two dimensions do not go hand in hand but high level group did better in balancing the two dimensions than the other two groups.These findings may help SLA researchers and practitioners get a better understanding of the position Chinese secondary EFL learners are at along the developmental continuum of second language learning and may hold some implications for EFL pedagogy as well as textbook and syllabus design.