Syntactic complexity development in college students’ essay writing based on AWE

Abstract

Syntactic complexity is considered to be an important device for assessing the quality of writing in a second language (L2), as it indicates the diversity and complexity of production units or grammatical structures. This paper studies the development of Chinese college students’ syntactic complexity in essay writing by using an Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) tool, the Pigai system (www.pigai.org, which has been most widely used in China in the last ten years). The data analysis showed that the students’ syntactic competences in their final drafts outperformed that in their first drafts in three aspects: length of production unit, amount of subordination, and amount of coordination.