Research On The Development Of English Majors’ Summary Writing Competence From The Perspective Of Complexity Theory

As an output language skill,English writing has always been one of the hot topics in second language acquisition.A large number of studies have shown that complexity and fluency are important dimensions to measure English writing competence(Yuan and Ellis,2004).However,the development of writing competence is not a simple linear process.This phenomenon is similar with the complexity theory.That is,the complexity theory opposes the linear development of language competence and believes that various elements in the language system are interrelated and interacted with each other(Larsen-Freeman.D.,2012).Therefore,it can be used as the theoretical basis for the study of writing competence.Based on complexity theory,this study takes complexity and fluency as evaluation variables to investigate development of summary writing competence.The subjects were 93 English majors in a university in northern China.In order to ensure the validity of the research results,this study conducted two rounds.651 texts were collected,and a self-constructed corpus was constructed to analyze.This study mainly answers three questions:(1)What are the developmental characteristics of students’ complexity in summary writing?(2)What are the developmental characteristics of students’ fluency in summary writing?(3)What prototypes emerge in the complexity and fluency of students’ L2 summary writing?In this study,the quantitative indicators include lexical complexity,syntactic complexity and discourse cohesion,which were got through L2 Lexical Complexity Analyzer,L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and Coh-Metrix.And SPSS was used to analyze raw data.The results show that: after summary writing homework training in reading course(1)The complexity of summary writing has a positive development.In terms of lexical complexity,the variation of content words and lexical variation increased significantly.In terms of syntactic complexity,the average sentence length increased significantly,as well as the ratio of compound phrase to clause and the ratio of complex noun phrase to clause.(2)Fluency of summary writing has a positive trend on the whole.Students’ competence of using reference and conjunction was significantly improved.(3)Three prototypes emerged in the development of syntactic complexity,lexical complexity and fluency.The changes of the data in the three prototypes are not simply caused by inputs,nor do they follow the linear trajectory.The development of summary writing competence is a wave development,that is,there are periods of rapid development of writing competence,and there are periods of temporary decline.This phenomenon fits in with complexity theories.This study enriches the research results of complex theory and details the influence of summary writing on the writing competence of English majors.Based on the development characteristics of second language writing and the results of this study,teachers can combine formative evaluation and summative evaluation according to different types of prototypes to make a comprehensive evaluation of writing competence.