Syntactic Complexity in Journal Research Article Abstracts Written in English

Abstract

The reader’s ability to connect new information to existing knowledge is crucial when reading a text. Nonetheless, text complexity, in many ways, is more linguistic than cognitive. It encompasses the degree of sophistication, and how challenging a reading section is. Depending on the section, such difficulty may appear on the vocabulary level, in the organizational structure, or with coherence, and cohesion. In the globalized world of scientific communication, research articles published in non-Anglophone academic journals require English abstracts to access an international database and citation possibilities. This paper describes the syntactic complexity in journal research article abstracts. A corpus of abstracts written in English and published in Anglophone and non-Anglophone contexts were sampled. The English sub-corpora underwent software-based text analysis using fourteen syntactic complexity measures with the second language (L2) Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). Significant differences appeared in only four of the fourteen syntactic indices between texts in Anglophone and non-Anglophone journals, and out of these fourteen measures, non-native groups reported thirteen lower mean values. The study affords insights for L2 writing research to produce accurate texts in content and structure. Ideally, findings will uncover pedagogical implications and applications for academic writing instructions.