A Study Of The Effect Of Genre On The Written Syntactic Complexity Of Chinese Second Language Learners

As one of the important indicators of second language proficiency,syntactic complexity plays an important role in second language acquisition,especially in the field of second language writing.In second language writing research,more and more studies have focused on the effects of various factors on syntactic complexity,such as learners'language proficiency,writing tasks and teaching environment.However,there are few studies on the influence of genre on the written syntactic complexity.It is even rare to explore the syntactic complexity of different genres of compositions from Chinese college students and college English textbooks.Therefore,by comparing Chinese college students'English compositions and college English textbooks' English essays,this study examines the influence of genre on the writers' syntactic complexity on the one hand,and investigates the characteristics of the syntactic complexity of Chinese college students' and college English textbooks' English writing on the other.The corpus of this study includes Chinese college students and textbooks' English essays.In this study,500 argumentative and narrative writings were selected from the corpus "Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners"(TECCL)as English writing materials for Chinese College students,and 100 argumentative and narrative articles were selected from four sets of College English textbooks as English teaching materials corpus.A computer annotation software Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)is used to automatically annotate the samples.The analyzer consists of 14 syntactic complexity measures gauging five dimensions:length of production unit,amount of subordination,amount of coordination,degree of phrasal sophistication,and overall sentence complexity.The statistical software SPSS is used to compare and analyze the syntactic complexity of compositions of different genres from the same source of corpus,and then to compare and analyze the syntactic complexity of compositions of the same genre from different sources of corpus.Findings of the present study are as follows:(1)Genre is one of the important factors that need to be considered in the study of syntactic complexity.There are significant genre differences in the syntactic complexity of Chinese college students' and college textbooks' English compositions,and the syntactic complexity of argumentative essays is higher than that of narrative essays.Specifically,there are differences in syntactic complexity between college students' argumentative writings and narrative writings.The differences reach statistical significance in the mean values of 13 out of the 14 syntactic complexity measures(all but one measure causes per sentence).For the essays in college English textbooks,the differences reach statistical significance in the mean values of 13 out of the 14 syntactic complexity measures(all but one measure T-units per sentence).(2)For writings of the same genre,the syntactic complexity of textbooks compositions is generally higher than that of students' compositions,while students'compositions show advantages in some measures.In argumentative writing,the differences in syntactic complexity between students' compositions and textbook compositions are mainly manifested in the length of production unit(ML and MLT)and the amount of subordination(C/T,CT/T,DC/C,DC/T).Chinese college students produce shorter sentences and T units and use fewer subordinate structures than those essays in textbooks.For other measures,although there is no significant difference statistically,the mean values of complex phrases per clause(CP/C)and the T-units per sentence(T/S)of college students is higher than that of textbooks.In narrative writing,the syntactic complexity of students' compositions and textbook compositions differ only in four indicators,including the mean length of clauses(MLC),the T-units per sentence(T/S),the verb phrases per T-unit(VP/T)and causes per sentence(C/S).Differing from argumentative writings,the mean length of clauses in textbooks' narratives is longer than that in students' compositions,while students tend to produce more T-units and clauses in their narrative writing,and the number of verb phrases in a T-unit is larger than that in textbooks' essays.All of these conclusions provide certain practical and enlightening significance to English writing learning and teaching.First of all,English teachers should pay more attention to the role of genre,and train students' writing ability by assigning writing tasks of genres.Secondly,L2 learners and teachers should pay attention to the differences between students' learning and language input in the same genre,and conduct English writing teaching and learning in a targeted way.