The Effects Of Genre On The Syntactic Complexity Of Chinese EFL Learners’ Writing—A Case Study Of Grade One Students In Senior High School

English language ability is the basic element of English subject core competencies.The cultivation of English writing ability is one of the important aspects of English teaching in high school and it is the main means to measure students’ ability of language output and application.As English writing plays an increasingly important role in the new college entrance examination reform in China,it is particularly urgent to effectively improve English writing teaching and students’ English writing level.Syntactic complexity,as an effective indicator of language development,2L proficiency and writing level,can reflect the diversity and complexity of syntactic structure in learners’ language output.Different writing genres involve different cognitive tasks and have different language requirements.Therefore,this paper,taking grade one student in senior high school as an example,mainly investigates the influence of genre on the syntactic complexity of EFL learners’ English writing in China,providing inspiration for teachers in English writing teaching and evaluation,and raising students’ awareness of genre differences in English writing.In this study,two small corpora were built by randomly selecting 50 practical texts and 50 narrative texts from 50 grade one students in a senior high school in Anhui Province.Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)is used to automatically label the syntactic complexity of the selected corpus.Starting from five dimensions: language production length,the number of coordinate structures,the number of subordinate structures,phrase complexity and sentence complexity,14 syntactic complexity indicators of practical text and narrative text are compared and analyzed by using statistical software SPSS 20.0.In addition,the overall writing quality is obtained by scoring the experimental text,and the descriptive statistical analysis and Pearson correlation analysis are used to investigate the difference of syntactic complexity between practical writing and narrative writing in writing quality.The study answers the following two questions: What is the difference in syntactic complexity between English narrative and practical writing of grade one students?What is the difference between the syntactic complexity of English narrative and practical writing of senior one student on their writing quality?This study made the following conclusions:(1)Chinese 2L learners’ practical writing and narrative writing showed significant genre differences in different syntactic complexity measures.That means,except the mean length of sentences(MLS),complex T-unit per T-unit(CT/T),dependent clauses per T-unit(DC/T),T-unit per sentence(T/S)and verb phrases per T-unit(VP/T),the other 9 indicators all showed significant differences in genre.The results showed that students often tried to explain their views or arguments with complex syntactic structures and long sentences in practical writing.However,in narrative writing,students had a single conversion of sentence patterns,overused simple sentences and lacked the sentences of subordinate structure.Thus the syntactic complexity of narrative text was affected.(2)The syntactic complexity of practical writing was higher than that of narrative writing,as a whole,and 9 of the 14 measures that achieved significant statistics were reflected in the following four categories: length of production unit,amount of coordination,degree of phrasal sophistication and overall sentence complexity.Moreover,there was a positive correlation between syntactic complexity and writing quality.The four measures,namely,clause per T-unit(C/T),T-unit per sentence(T/S),complex nominals per clause(CN/C)and complex nominals per T-unit(CN/T),could predict the overall quality of students’ English writing without being influenced by genre factors.The results showed that the overall level of syntactic complexity of middle school students was still in the primary stage,and the use of syntactic structures in practical writing and narrative writing needed to be improved.Theoretically,this study discussed the influence of genre effect on the syntactic complexity of practical writing and narrative writing of grade one students,which was helpful to further deepen the theoretical construction of syntactic complexity and the research on its measurement index and provide relevant inspiration for the further study of syntactic complexity in the future.In practice,this study provided some reference data and theoretical basis for senior high school English learners,English writing teaching and education-related departments,so that second language writing teaching could improve the shortcomings of second language learners’ writing more specifically in senior high school courses.