Development of clausal and phrasal complexity in L2 writing: A case of argumentative essays of Korean college students

IF 3.2 1区文学 Q1 LINGUISTICS

English for Specific Purposes Pub Date : 2023-10-12 DOI:10.1016/j.esp.2023.09.003

Narae Seo, Sun-Young Oh

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引用次数: 0

Abstract

This study aims to estimate the developmental trajectory of grammatical complexity for L2 writers by investigating the extent to which clausal and phrasal complexity is associated with L2 writing proficiency. The corpus used in this study contained 234 argumentative essays of first-year Korean college students at three proficiency levels. The five clausal and four phrasal features were extracted from the tagged corpus to count the frequency of each complexity feature. Our findings demonstrated an association between writing proficiency and clausal and phrasal complexity. Especially noteworthy was that the main source of complexity at each proficiency level (i.e., finite adverbial clauses, WH relative clauses, of phrases as nominal postmodifiers) showed a gradual increase in complexity in terms of two parameters: structural type and syntactic function. A qualitative follow-up analysis provided a detailed description of differences among developmental levels, especially with respect to the lexical associations of particular complexity features. Pedagogical implications are for using empirically derived developmental stages in creating detailed rating scale descriptors and providing more customized writing courses accordingly.

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二语写作中从句和短语复杂性的发展——以韩国大学生议论文为例

本研究旨在通过调查小句和短语复杂性与二语写作水平的关系来估计二语作者语法复杂性的发展轨迹。本研究使用的语料库包含234篇韩国大学生一年级的三个水平的议论文。从标记语料库中提取五个小句和四个短语特征，统计每个复杂度特征的频率。我们的研究结果表明，写作能力与从句和短语的复杂性之间存在联系。特别值得注意的是，在每一个熟练水平上，复杂性的主要来源（即作为名词性后修饰语的短语的有限状语从句、WH关系从句）在结构类型和句法功能两个参数方面显示出复杂性的逐渐增加。一项定性的后续分析详细描述了发展水平之间的差异，特别是在特定复杂性特征的词汇联想方面。教学意义是使用经验推导的发展阶段来创建详细的评分量表描述符，并相应地提供更定制的写作课程。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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来源期刊

English for Specific Purposes LINGUISTICS-

CiteScore

5.70

自引率

8.00%

发文量

审稿时长

62 days

期刊介绍： English For Specific Purposes is an international peer-reviewed journal that welcomes submissions from across the world. Authors are encouraged to submit articles and research/discussion notes on topics relevant to the teaching and learning of discourse for specific communities: academic, occupational, or otherwise specialized. Topics such as the following may be treated from the perspective of English for specific purposes: second language acquisition in specialized contexts, needs assessment, curriculum development and evaluation, materials preparation, discourse analysis, descriptions of specialized varieties of English.