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Frontiers in Educational Research, 2023, 6(16); doi: 10.25236/FER.2023.061621.

A Comparative Study of the Syntactic Complexity of English Writing for High School Students

Author(s)

Xiaomin Deng

Corresponding Author:
Xiaomin Deng
Affiliation(s)

College of Education, China West Normal University, Nanchong, 637000, China

Abstract

Based on the self-built corpus and LOCNESS corpus, combined with L2 syntactic Complexity measurement index, SPSS, and other software are utilized to explore the commonality and difference in syntactic complexity between English language learners and native speakers with a large-scale corpus of compositions. Concluding the study, English language learners were significantly lower than native speakers in seven of these measures. Although there is not any statistically significant difference in the average length measure of T-unit, there is a large numerical difference. The results have a certain significance for teaching and learning in second language writing.

Keywords

syntactic complexity, English language learners, native speakers, second language writing

Cite This Paper

Xiaomin Deng. A Comparative Study of the Syntactic Complexity of English Writing for High School Students. Frontiers in Educational Research (2023) Vol. 6, Issue 16: 124-128. https://doi.org/10.25236/FER.2023.061621.

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