Syntactic complexity development in the writings of EFL learners: Insights from a dependency syntactically-annotated corpus

Abstract

This study investigates the syntactic complexity, as measured by both large-grained and fine-grained measures, of 410 narrative writings across four writing proficiency levels written by beginner and intermediate L2 English learners. By exploring the differences in syntactic complexity between writings at different proficiency levels, the study is purposed to find out the measures that can best discriminate and predict writing proficiency. The L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and the dependency syntactically-annotated corpus are used respectively to collect the data for large-grained and fine-grained measures. With regard to large-grained measures, it is found that students with higher writing proficiency tend to produce longer language units, more subordinate clauses, more coordinate clauses, and more noun phrases in their writings; mean length of T-unit, mean length of sentence, and dependent clauses per clause can better predict writing proficiency than other traditional large-grained measures. As for fine-grained measures, it is found that three types of subordinate clauses, that is, adverbial clauses, complement clauses and relative clauses, and two types of noun modifiers, that is, prepositional phrases and adjectival relative clauses, occur more frequently in the writings of more proficient learners; the frequency of compound nouns correlates negatively with writing proficiency.