A Comparative Study on the Syntactic Complexity of College English Writing between Chinese EFL Learners and Native English Speakers

In this study, a corpus was constructed based on students' English compositions from a regional college (TEST), with additional data selected from the TECCL, WECCL, and LOCNESS corpora, in attempting to compare syntactic complexity among English learners in Chinese universities and that between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers. The results showed that there was significant difference in the syntactic complexity of English writing among Chinese undergraduates, and in particular, the syntactic complexity of students from the regional college was significantly higher than their counterparts in other schools, even when the former students were thought to be less proficient in English abilities than the latter. However, there were significant differences in the values of syntactic complexity indicators between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers, with the exception of only three indicators, namely Mean length of clause (MLC), Number of T-units per sentence (T/S) and Number of complex nominals per T-unit (CN/T). In addition, further analysis on the example sentences proved that the accuracy of a few indicators of syntactic complexity was affected by the writers' competence in syntax, in hope that refined T-unit indicator, in particular, should be explored.