Measures of syntactic complexity have been used to evaluate task-related variation and pedagogic interventions in L2 writing production, and to assess differences across proficiency levels and over time. This paper reports on a corpus-based investigation of syntactic complexity and fluency in narrative and argumentative writing, comparing texts produced by 170 L2 learners at the starts of their first and second years at university. Conventional metrics were used to compare syntactic complexity and fluency in the two sets of samples; novel methods were also devised to examine possible changes in sentence variety and the development of sentence construction. Significant differences within the first and second year corpora reflected responses to the genre-specific demands on text production, but length of instruction only significantly impacted on narrative writing. Argumentative texts presented significantly greater syntactic complexity but, in sharp contrast to the findings of previous studies, also evidenced significantly greater fluency. The Sentence Variety Index and sentence reconstruction both offered insights into writing production, suggesting the value of the suite of metrics used in this research to the longitudinal study of L2 genre writing.
A Corpus-based Investigation of Syntactic Complexity, Fluency, Sentence Variety, and Sentence Development in L2 Genre Writing
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紀要93巻 Nicolai Struc and Nicholas Wood
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