The Effects Of Two Types Of Writing Tasks On Different Levels EFL Learners' Syntactic Complexity In English Writings

As one of the important construction thoughts in the teaching and research of L2 writing,the relationship between syntactic complexity and L2 learners' language level and writing quality has become the focus of many L2 writing studies.In today's English teaching environment,with the emergence of the whole language teaching concept and multi-modal communication situation,integrated writing tasks have been more and more widely used in various large-scale examinations.To this end,the author conducted an in-depth study on the influences of two types of writing tasks and learners' proficiency on EFL learners' syntactic complexity in their English writings.The two types of writing tasks studied in this research are independent writing and reading-to-write writing.This study explored three research questions: 1)What are the effects of two types of writing tasks on the syntactic complexity of students' English writings? 2)What are the effects of EFL learners at different levels on the syntactic complexity of students' English writings? 3)What are the interaction effects of the two types of writing tasks and different EFL learners on the syntactic complexity of students' English writings?The participants of this study are 203 non-English freshmen and 260 non-English postgraduates.In this study,freshmen did not pass CET-4 as low-level learners;postgraduates passed CET-6 as high-level learners.The two groups of participants complete the independent writing and the reading-to-write writing respectively.The L2 SCA developed by Lu was applied to measure and analyze the 14 measures(MLC,MLS,MLT,C/T,CT/T,DC/C,DC/T,CP/C,CP/T,T/S,CN/C,CN/T,VP/T,and C/S)of the writing samples.The data collected in the study were tested by two-way between-subjects ANOVA and simple effect test by SPSS23.0.The results indicate 1)The types of writing tasks have significant effects on 8 of the 14 measures of syntactic complexity,including MLC,MLT,CP/C,CP/T,T/S,CN/C,CN/T and VP/T.The syntactic complexity of reading-to-write is better than that of independent writing.2)The syntactic complexity of high-level learners is higher than that of low-level students.The proficiency of students significantly affected 10 of the 14 measures of syntactic complexity,including MLC,MLS,MLT,CP/C,CP/T,T/S,CN/C,CN/T,VP/T and C/S.3)Writing task types interact significantly with learners' level in MLS,C/S,T/S,CP/T and CN/T.For low-level learners,independent writing is better than reading-to-write writing task;for high-level learners,reading-to-write writing task can better reflect their comprehensive writing performance.Based on the findings,this study aims to provide some implications to English writing teaching for Chinese college students.1)In the process of English writing teaching,we should strengthen the training of basic writing ability of low level learners and expand their vocabulary so that learners can use vocabulary flexibly;at the same time,the sentence accuracy training should also be strengthened.2)Under the principle of teaching students according to their aptitude,the reading-to-write writing could be often adopted in the writing teaching of highlevel learners,so as to cultivate their ability to use multi-channel information to deal with problems and express ideas.3)In the teaching of English writing in our country,we can increase the integration of listening,reading and writing skills,and pay attention to the ability of presenting contrastive rebuttal,expressing opinions and solving problems through writing.