Effects of extracurricular academic reading on syntactic development in L2 abstract writing

This study investigates how and to what extent extracurricular academic reading (AR) enhances the syntactic complexity (SC) of graduate students’ abstract writing. Through a semester-long AR programme, we collected and analysed research article abstracts written by 30 s-year graduate students majoring in English literature, compared with another 30 English literature students who did not participate in the AR programme. By using a combined set of large- and fine-grained SC indices, the results showed the AR group exhibited significantly greater development of SC than the comparison group. It was found that AR students produced longer sentences, and used more subordination, complex nominals, verb phrases, nominal clauses, initial adverbial participle clauses, finite relative clauses, and multiple prepositional phrases after AR programme. In contrast, the comparison group showed growth only in the holistic length of sentence, the usage of coordination phrases and multiple-word sequences as pre-modifiers. The findings suggest that AR programme contributes to the SC development of AR students, who gained a deeper understanding of the abstract genre and its rhetorical structure. This study also provides new insights and pedagogical implications for L2 academic writing instruction.