| Spanish is one of the main world languages taught in Chinese colleges,with over 100 colleges and universities offering a Spanish major in 2020(Yang 2021).Consequentially,research on the acquisition of Spanish syntax and lexicon among Chinese students remains an urgent issue to be explored.However,there is still a lack of domestic research on this topic.This study analyzed the syntactic complexity in Chinese college-level Spanish learners’ writing across different proficiency levels,explored the differences between learners’ writing and native speakers’ writing and investigated the relation between syntactic complexity and subjective perceptions of writing quality.The study analyzed 893 timed essays with human ratings and 140 un-timed essays written by second-year,third-year and fourth-year students from the Chinese Learner Corpus of Spanish(Corpus de Aprendices Chinos de Espa?ol,CACE,He and Liu 2018),along with Spanish coursebook texts and newspaper editorial articles which served as writing from native speakers of upper-intermediate and advanced levels for comparison.The multidimensional framework in this study measured syntactic complexity from three levels:overall complexity,complexity by subordination and coordination,and noun phrase elaboration,including 12 indices in total.With regard to methods of data analyses,the study adopted multivariate analysis of variance,ordinal logistic regression models and multiple linear regression models to conduct statistical analyses.Patterns reflected in the data are analyzed and explained with specific essay texts.The results revealed significant differences in syntactic complexity values between learners’ writing of any two adjacent levels in some of the measures,while differences in syntactic complexity between writing of two non-adjacent levels were found in most of the measures.The results also showed that editorials articles differed significantly from fourth-year students’ writing and textbooks in terms of syntactic complexity,but the differences between textbooks and fourth-year students’ writing were minor.Furthermore,the study found that eight syntactic indices,including MLT,CN/C,MLCN,etc.,can together explain 15.4%of the variation in essays’ ratings.While interpreting the coefficients was difficult,the combination of measures of the same type made it easier to interpret the results.Overall,this study contributed to people’s understanding of the syntax acquisition process of Chinese Spanish learners and introduced new tools and ideas into learner Spanish writing research.The findings of the study provided insights into the design of textbooks,the assessment and instruction of learner Spanish writing. |
