An Experimental Study On The Effects Of Complex Sentence Training On Senior High School Students' English Writing

Syntactic complexity,or the range of forms in language production and the degree of sophistication of such forms,is one of the important constructs in L2 writing teaching and research.However,heavy use of monotonous sentence structures and simple sentence patterns dominate high school students' English writing,an apparent result of the students being unable to convert their reading comprehension,which is obtained from large amounts of exposure to the language input,to writing competence.An abundance of inquiry has been done into syntactic complexity in college learners' English writing,but few experimental researches by using teaching instructions as a treatment to improve syntactic complexity in secondary school learners' English writing have been reported.Therefore,based on Input Enhancement Hypothesis,Notice Hypothesis and Output Hypothesis,the present study attempts to investigate the effects of complex sentence training upon the syntactic complexity and writing proficiency in the senior high school students' English writing.The research questions are as follows: 1)What effects does complex sentence training have upon senior-school-students' syntactic complexity in English writing? 2)What effects does complex sentence training have upon senior-school-students' English writing proficiency?The study is carried out in a senior high school in Guangzhou,involving a total of 78 students,equally divided into an experimental group and a control group.The study lasts for 9 weeks,during which all the participants complete continuous writing assignments,with only the experimental group receiving complex sentence training.The training focuses on subject clauses,object clauses,predicative clauses,appositive clauses,attributive clauses and adverbial clauses.The research instruments include pretest and posttest.The pretest aims to rule out the possibility of a significant difference in syntactic complexity and overall English writing proficiency between the two groups while the posttest aims to investigate the effects of complex sentence training upon the syntactic complexity and writing proficiency.The present study uses L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer to analyze the corpus for 14 syntactic complexity measures.Then,it conducts independent samples t-tests and analyzes the collected data.The study comes up with these findings:1)In terms of length of production units,clause density,and ratio of complex sentences,7 measures are higher in the experimental group than in the control group.This suggests that complex sentence training has a positive effect on the syntactic complexity of senior high school students' English writing.2)In terms of English writing performance,the scores of the experimental group are significantly higher than those of the control group.That is to say,complex sentence training has a positive effect on senior high school students' English writing proficiency.This study confirms the hypothesis that complex sentence training is an effective approach to developing syntactic complexity and writing proficiency of senior school students.The research results provide senior high schools English teachers with meaningful implications.