A Longitudinal Study Of Syntactic Complexity In Middle School Students’ English Writing

As an effective indicator to measure second language proficiency and writing quality,syntactic complexity plays an important role in second language acquisition,especially in the field of second language writing.In recent years,there has been an increasing amount of research into syntactic complexity.However,there are few studies on the influence of genre on the written syntactic complexity,and it is even rarer to explore the syntactic complexity of narration and practical writing by Chinese middle school students.Besides,little research has been conducted to explore the likely development of L2 writing of middle school students across different stages of English language education in China.Therefore,in the light of dynamic system theory,this study selects middle school students’ writings in Chinese learners English Corpus(CLEC)and Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners(TECCL)as research objects.The two corpora were respectively built in 2003 and 2015,representing two generations of middle school English learners spanning 12 years.A computer annotation software Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyzer(L2SCA)is used to explore the influence of genre on syntactic complexity and the diachronic changes of syntactic complexity in the English writing from Chinese middle school English learners of different generations in the same genre.The major findings are presented as follows:(1)The syntactic complexity shows significant genre differences between Chinese middle school students’ English narrative texts and practical texts and the syntactic complexity of practical texts is generally higher than that of narrative texts.Compared with narrative texts,practical texts have longer sentences and T-units,more subordinate structures,and higher degree of phrasal sophistication,but less coordinate structures.The two dimensions with the highest degree of genre distinction are the amount of subordination and degree of phrasal sophistication,while the clauses per sentence(C/S)cannot stably distinguish between practical texts and narrative texts.(2)In narrative writing,the syntactic complexity of middle school students has made significant progress over 12 years,and 4 out of the 5 dimensions(all but one dimension amount of coordination)all reflect significant increases.It shows that Chinese students’ syntactic level in narrative texts has been significantly improved during 12 years.However,the coordinate structures in the narrative texts of middle school students are underdeveloped.(3)In practical writing,there are 7 indicators of syntactic complexity of middle school students showing an upward trend.Middle school students after 12 years are able to write longer sentences and clauses and use more complex nominals in practical texts.Unlike narrative texts,middle school students have made significant progress in the amount of coordination in practical texts.However,the decline of several indicators needs attention,especially the four indicators of subordination structure all show a downward trend,indicating that the syntactic ability of middle school students in using subordinate structure in practical writing has declined.The findings not only reveal the potential backwash effect of China’s new round of curriculum reform on students’ second language writing ability,but also confirm that the dynamic system theory has strong explanatory power for the development trend of syntax.All of these findings not only enrich the domestic research on syntactic complexity from a new theoretical perspective,but also has the following implications for English writing teaching:(1)Teachers should cultivate students’ writing skills step by step,and encourage students to use complex structures and advanced phrases to improve the syntactic complexity of their compositions.(2)Track the development trend of students’ syntactic complexity,and conduct targeted training on indicators of poor performance,so that all dimensions of students’ syntactic complexity can be developed in a balanced manner.(3)Arrange writing tasks of different genres to exercise students’ writing ability and improve students’ stylistic awareness.(4)The index of syntactic complexity can be appropriately added to the composition scoring standard.