A Study on the Syntactic Complexity of Writings of Non-English Major Learners

Abstract

This paper collects students’ compositions from two levels of university English tiered teaching A,B, in an attempt to
examine the syntactic complexity of students’ writing in terms of several dimensional indicators, such as the length of linguistic output,
the number of subordinate structures, the number of parallel structures and the complexity of phrases, etc. The results show that the higher
the level of English profi ciency, the higher the syntactic complexity of students; and comparing the writing of native speakers and Chinese
learners’, the results show that the syntactic complexity of Chinese learners diff ers signifi cantly in terms of linguistic output, the use of
specifi c phrases, and the overall structure of the sentences.