A Study Of The Development Of Linguistic Complexity In Junior High School Students’ English Writing

In the last few decades,there has been a plethora of studies on the importance of linguistic complexity in second language acquisition research and pedagogy.Lexical and syntactic complexity have been proved to be effective indicators of language development,L2 proficiency and writing quality.However,few long-term and large-scale studies have been conducted to address the linguistic developmental tendency of Chinese young adolescents at the beginning-level from a comprehensive perspective.The present study examined the longitudinal development of linguistic complexity with a self-built corpus of 670 EFL(English as a foreign language)compositions written by the same cohort of 134 Chinese junior school students over a time span of five consecutive semesters across three academic years.The compositions were analyzed to trace the longitudinal trajectories of lexical,syntactic and morphological complexity over time.Some potential explanations associated with the findings were discussed.Drawing on Language Exposure Hypothesis,the present research mainly probed into the following three research questions:(1)What is the lexical trajectory of system complexity in junior high school students’ English writing?(2)What is the developmental trajectory of syntactic complexity in junior high school students’ English writing?(3)What is the developmental trajectory of morphological complexity in junior high school students’ English writing?Altogether three automatic tools,namely,Lexical Complexity Analyzer(LCA),Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)and Morpho Complexity Tool(MCT)were employed to assess the lexical,syntactic and morphological complexity values of each composition respectively.Then,the statistical results were put into SPSS 26.0 for repeated measures analysis of variance(RM ANOVA)and LSD back testing.Detailed analysis unveiled non-linear and unevenly-paced developments in all the sub-dimensions over time.Regarding lexical complexity,lexical density decreases in the initial stage and takes an upward turn.In the later stage,it declines again and stagnates.Lexical variation presents an upward trajectory on the whole despite a backslide in the fourth semester due to genre effect.Lexical sophistication rises significantly in the incipient period but stagnates in the later stage.With regard to syntactic complexity,as students move to upper grades,subordination demonstrates stable increases.The length of production unit and the ratio of complex nominals in clauses display an upward tendency in general in spite of a downturn in the fourth semester.Different from the abovementioned measures of syntactic complexity,coordination fluctuates drastically.Finally,morphological complexity uplifts spirally and reaches a relatively high level even compared with college-level learners in the later stage.These findings are consistent with Language Exposure Hypothesis,which lays emphasis on exposure in the second language acquisition process.This longitudinal study enriches the current literature on linguistic complexity theoretically and provides implications for teachers,designers of textbooks and researchers of linguistic complexity.