An Empirical Study On The Effects Of Writing Environment On Syntactic Complexity In English Majors' Compositions

Syntactic complexity,as one of the important constructs in second language teaching,learning and researching,has aroused researchers'widespread attention at home and abroad.In recent years,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 different aspects of syntactic complexity or syntactic complexity under different conditions,such as time conditions,writing genres,task types or the factors related to the writing environment,but there are few studies dedicated to the effects of learners' factors and teaching environment on syntactic complexity.Meanwhile,studies on the effects of writing environment on syntactic complexity are rather limited.Therefore,the present study will probe into the effects of differences in writing environments on syntactic complexity.The present study aims to address the two research questions:(1)What are the characteristics of syntactic complexity displayed in English majors' writing in writing testing environment and writing training environment?(2)What are the effects of different environments on the syntactic complexity of English majors at different proficiency levels?The research subjects of the present study are 69 English majors from a university in Changsha and the research instrument is writing test.The corpora for 14 syntactic complexity measures and the results of syntactic analysis was put into the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(Lu 2011)the SPSS respectively.The research results will be obtained by independent-sample T-test,paired-sample test and Pearson's correlation analysis.Findings of the present study are as follows:(1)English majors in writing testing environment performed better in the key measures of syntactic complexity than those in writing training environment,which demonstrates that English majors' syntactic complexity in writing testing environment is higher than in writing training environment.(2)The average numbers of all fourteen syntactic complexity measures of English majors at high proficiency level in writing testing environment all surpassed those in writing training environment,and the mean values of all fourteen syntactic complexity measures of English majors at low proficiency level in writing testing environment all surpassed those in writing training environment.This indicates that English majors'syntactic complexity in writing testing environment exceeds than those in writing training environment.In writing testing environment,the mean values of 10 measures in 5 aspects of syntactic complexity were close in two groups.Significant differences were exhibited in subordination and coordination,which means students at high proficiency level could write more complex T-units and dependent clauses than those at low proficiency level.In writing training environment,statistical significance was exhibited in 10 measures of all 5 dimensions of syntactic complexity at high proficiency group and low proficiency group,and the overall level of high proficiency group in syntactic complexity was higher than low proficiency level.The present study has some limitations:it confined students'writings to argumentation and the sample size is limited.However,the present study has enhanced the research on syntactic complexity in different environments and produced positive pedagogical implications for English writing teaching.