A Study On The Development Of Lexical And Syntactic Complexity In AWE-based College Students’ English Argumentative Writing

Lexical complexity and syntactic complexity are often operationalized to gauge writing complexity.This study investigated college non-English majors’ developing trajectory in lexical and syntactic complexity under the guidance of the AWE system.Complexity taxonomy reported by Bulte&Housen(2012)was adopted by this paper.Two online complexity analyzers were utilized for statistical analysis,namely,Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA)and Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA).A questionnaire was assigned to understand their perceptions of AWE systems.Students accomplished their argumentative writing on Pigai system(http://www.pigai.org/),and revised their drafts according to formative feedback provided by Pigai system.On average,66 participants polished their drafts 15.86 times.All revision drafts were collected as research corpus to investigate features of students’ lexical and syntactic development.Results revealed that the developing trajectory of lexical complexity has the following features.(1)No clear development has been found in the values of lexical density.The results reconfirmed previous research that lexical density measure can not signify the difference among adjacent language proficiency.(2)Lexical sophistication development showed rapid growth in the late revising process.(3)Lexical diversity increased in the middle and late revision process.The developing trend of syntactic complexity is featured as follows.(1)The mean length of production units increased as they polished their drafts,and a high growth rate was shown in the late period.(2)An increasing number of complex sentences were used in the late revision process.(3)Students tended to adopt more subordination rather than coordination.(4)The number of complex nominals increased with fluctuations,while the number of verb phrases continuously grew.In a word,students’ writing complexity shows unbalanced developing trajectories in different revision periods.AWE system is a helpful auxiliary tool to improve students’ lexical and syntactic complexity,and instructors should attach more attention to syntactic complexity for further development.