Language Proficiency and Syntactic Complexity of Chinese EFL Writers: A Corpus-based Study

Abstract

This study examined the argumentative essays written by Chinese English major students studying at four different college levels. Statistical analysis of syntactic complexity indices showed that despite the effect size being minimum, significant development in majority of the measures was observed. In particular, at phrasal level as measured by complex nominals and verb phrases, there was a linear model of growth with learners at a higher proficiency outperforming the adjacent lower-level learners. These results seemed to confirm some of previous research showing a developmental trajectory of writing complexity moving from clausal to phrasal elaboration. Implications of these results for writing pedagogy were discussed.