Noun phrase complexity in young Spanish EFL learners’ writing

María Belén Díez-Bedmar,Pascual Pérez-Paredes

doi:10.1075/ijcl.17058.die

María Belén Díez-Bedmar, Pascual Pérez-Paredes

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.17058.die

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Abstract

Abstract The research reported in this article examines Noun Phrase (NP) syntactic complexity in the writing of Spanish EFL secondary school learners in Grades 7, 8, 11 and 12 in the International Corpus of Crosslinguistic Interlanguage. Two methods were combined: a manual parsing of NPs and an automatic analysis of NP indices using the Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC). Our results revealed that it is in premodifying slots that syntactic complexity in NPs develops. We argue that two measures, (i) nouns and modifiers (a syntactic complexity index) and (ii) determiner + multiple premodification + head (a NP type obtained as a result of a corpus-driven analysis), can be used as indices of syntactic complexity in young Spanish EFL learner language development. Besides offering a learner-language-driven taxonomy of NP syntactic complexity, the paper underscores the strength of using combined methods in SLA research.

Highlights

The study of noun use in learner writing at different educational or proficiency levels has been informed by previous analyses in the Learner Corpus Research tradition and, to a lesser extent, by studies of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) measures (Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Skehan, 1989)
The manual parsing of the eight hundred and thirty-two noun phrase (NP) in the learner corpus shows that (i) the use of two determiners is common across all learner groups except for Grade 7; (ii) multiple postmodification is used by most learner groups (Grades 7, 11 and 12), as is the case with multiple premodification (Grades 8, 11 and 12); and (iii) appositions in postmodifying NPs are used by all learner groups
We have found that the use of the “Nouns as modifiers” index yields significant differences between Grades 8 and 12, which confirms our finding that premodification slots are of interest for the study of learner language development

Summary

Introduction

The study of noun use in learner writing at different educational or proficiency levels has been informed by previous analyses in the Learner Corpus Research tradition and, to a lesser extent, by studies of complexity, accuracy and fluency (CAF) measures (Larsen-Freeman, 2006; Skehan, 1989). Sectional use of nouns in collocational frames has gained popularity in corpus linguistics studies during the last decade, nouns have not been the primary focus of CAF studies. These studies have generally used complexity indices such as mean lengths (Lu, 2011) mainly involving clauses, T-units and sentences (WolfeQuintero et al, 1998). These indices have shown to be sensitive to learner performance level. The authors point out that embedded noun phrases create the conditions for more elaborated meanings that, in turn, are “more complex from a processing perspective, than alternative structures with dependent clauses” (Biber & Gray, 2016: 245)

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