A Corpus‐Based Evaluation of Syntactic Complexity Measures as Indices of College‐Level ESL Writers' Language Development

Abstract

This article reports results of a corpus‐based evaluation of 14 syntactic complexity measures as objective indices of college‐level English as a second language (ESL) writers' language development. I analyzed large‐scale ESL writing data from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (Wen, Wang, & Liang, 2005) using a computational system designed to automate syntactic complexity measurement with 14 measures that have been proposed in second language writing development studies (Lu, 2010). This analysis allows us to investigate the impact of sampling condition on the relationship between syntactic complexity and language development, to identify measures that significantly differentiate between developmental levels, to determine the magnitude at which between‐level differences in each measure reach statistical significance, to assess the pattern of development associated with each measure, and to examine the strength of the relationship between different pairs of measures. This research provides ESL teachers and researchers with useful insights into how these measures can be used effectively as indices of college‐level ESL writers' language development.

Noun Phrase Complexity in EFL Academic Writing: A Corpus-based Study of Postgraduate Academic Writing

“…Such a trade-off may very probably be the result of employing nominalization, by which process clauses are packed into noun phrases, thus reducing the amount of simple, oral-style subordination on the whole. Measures that gauge noun phrase complexity have also been found to significantly differentiate among writing samples of different proficiency levels; however, no measures for subordination density have been found to have this function (Lu, 2011). These findings further point to noun phrase complexity as a strong indicator of advanced literacy, deserving more attention from L2 writing researchers and practitioners alike.…”

“…Byrnes, 2009;Byrnes, Maxim, & Norris, 2010;Lu, 2011). It has been found that there exists a dynamic relationship between coordination and subordinationbased complexity and phrasal complexity, exhibiting a trade-off between the two towards more advanced literacy levels (Byrnes et al, 2010; see also Ortega, 2003).…”

“…Complex noun phrases are one of the most distinctive clause-level features in English academic discourse (Biber et al, 2011;Lu, 2011;Norris & Ortega, 2009). This study compared writings by advanced Chinese EFL students and published writers and found a significantly lower noun phrase complexity in the student corpus than in the published corpus on all three NP complexity measures: mean length of clause; complex nominals per T-unit; and complex nominals per clause.…”

Exploring the Effects of the Continuation Task on Syntactic Complexity in Second Language Writing

“…These include three measures of length of production: MLC, MLS, and MLT; two coordinate phrase measures, CP/C and CP/T; and two complex nominal measures, CN/C and CN/T. We select these because the seven indexes show significant positive changes from lower to higher levels (Lu, 2011). In this study, Lu analyzed 3,678 essays from a corpus to investigate the relationship between syntactic complexity and language development and detect these 7 indexes progress linearly across English levels.…”

“…Over the past decades, the study of syntactic complexity in learners' written production has attracted increasing interests from both second language acquisition (SLA) and second language (L2) writing researchers, as evidenced in a voluminous body of research that has explored the relationship between syntactic complexity and L2 proficiency (e.g., Ai & Lu, 2013;Lu, 2011Lu, , 2015Ortega, 2015;Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998;Youn, 2015).…”