The Effectiveness of Incorporating Literature on the Syntactic Maturity of EFL Students

Abstract

This is a pilot study to test the effectiveness of incorporating literature into EFL classes in enhancing the Egyptian learners' language proficiency. The study addresses the problem that EFL learners are not exposed to much reading outside the assigned language textbooks which rely heavily on well-structured decontextualized sentences. Hence, the study hypothesizes that EFL students who are exposed to reading literary texts demonstrate more syntactic maturity in their writing product. The objective of the study is to investigate how incorporating literature into a language course enhances the growth of the students' syntactic maturity which reflects on improving their writing quality. A questionnaire was created, and a four-levelled checklist was developed based on the statistical findings of the questionnaire. The data comprises samples of the EFL learners' 'pre-and post-writing. The analytical tools of the data comprise: (1) The Web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer designed by Lu (2010) to measure syntactic complexities in second language learning based on T-Unit segmentation, (2) the two-way ANOVA statistical program for measuring the differences in syntactic complexity for the students' pre-and post-writing. Findings of the ANOVA statistical analysis for overall group scores on the four levels of syntactic complexity: length of production, sentence complexity, subordination, and coordination show that the students' post-writing exceeded their pre-writing in the overall increase of syntactic maturity at the .001 level of significance. Findings of the analysis also revealed that there is a significant increase in the students' syntactic complexity which has its impact on improving their writing quality after an intensive practice on how to read and respond to a literary text.