Understanding Advanced Level Academic Writing on Syntactic Complexity

Understanding Advanced Level Academic Writing on Syntactic Complexity Miao Wang Wander Lowie Shanghai International Studies University Rijksuniversiteit Groningen 550 Dalian Road (W) Oude Kijk in Het Jatstraat 26, 9712 EK Shanghai, China The Netherlands miaowang@shisu.edu.cn w.m.lowie@rug.nl Abstract Recent publications have highlighted the combination of large-grained and fine- grained indices to tap into syntactic complexity. Yet few studies have examined the writing produced by more advanced academic writers from a cross-linguistic perspective. This paper reports a corpus- based comparison of the native speaker (NS) and the Chinese advanced academic writers’ written abstracts. The study analyzed 120 texts within applied linguistics to discuss the extent to which the Chinese and the native writers’ writing differed in 16 measures of syntactic complexity. The article also compared across levels of English language proficiency and language background. The results revealed that the NS professional group generated more subordination than the Chinese professional writer group. Within-group comparisons yielded statistically significant differences in fine- grained syntactic complexity for the Chinese group. These results show considerable differences between the Chinese academic writers and native speakers residing in subordination. The results have implications for incorporating subordination to writing instruction for L2 writers at a more advanced level. 1 Introduction In second language (L2) writing research, syntactic complexity refers to the sophistication of syntactic structures exhibited in language production (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2015). Previous scholarship has frequently used syntactic complexity to assess writing quality. It can demonstrate learners’ language development and syntactic maturity (Crossley et al., 2011; Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998). Several researchers have attempted to determine a comprehensive and organic measuring system to assess L2 writing and L2 language proficiency since 2009. The call for a more comprehensive and multi-dimensional construct (Norris and Ortega, 2009; Bulté and Housen, 2012) combined with the introduction of large-scale corpus-based approaches (Biber and Gray, 2010; Biber, Gray, and Poonpon, 2011), led to the attempted integration of fine-grained measures of complexity at both the phrasal level and the clausal level and large-grained measures of complexity at the clause or sentence level (the length-based indices, such as the length of clauses, T-units, and/or sentences). Many studies have shown that first language (L1) background can potentially impact L2 syntactic complexity (Kuiken and Vedder, 2019; Lu and Ai, 2015; Staples and Reppen, 2016). Some studies on L1 and L2 syntactic complexity have focused on primary and secondary school students (Jiang et al., 2019). With the growing number of international students enrolled in higher education in English speaking countries in recent years, extensive research on L2 syntactic complexity has been dedicated to identifying potentially different patterns of syntactic complexity between native speakers (NSs) and non-native speakers (NNSs) of English at university-level (Ai and Lu, 2013; Casal and Li, 2019; Lu and Ai, 2015; Staples and Reppen, 2016). However, a limited number of studies have examined the variation of L2 written syntactic complexity at more advanced levels of language development. It is still unclear how much the written syntactic complexity produced by highly advanced non-native …

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