不同英语写作水平学生议论文写作句法复杂性差异研究
关键词 英语 议论文写作 句法复杂性
毕业论文外文摘要
Title A Study on the Syntactic Complexity of Argumentative Compositions by College Students of Different English Levels
Abstract
Syntactic complexity reflects the variety of language production forms and sophistication of the internal structure of sentences, as a result, it can be used to assess writing levels of English learners. In this study, 50 writings were selected from a qualification contest of “FLTRP Cup” English writing contest in Nanjing University of Science and Technology, 25 writings from higher performance group and 25 writings from low performance group; Three indices from overall complexity, subordination complexity and phrasal complexity were employed. This study is aimed at finding the difference of syntactic complexity between students with different English levels. Results showed that in overall complexity and phrasal complexity, the writings of students with higher English level perform better than those of students with lower English level; However, in subordination complexity, there is no big difference between the two groups.
Keywords English Argumentative writing Syntactic complexity
Table of Contents
1 Introduction 1
1.1 Background 1
1.2 Purpose of this research 1
2 Literature Review 3
2.1 Definition of syntactic complexity 3
2.2 Syntactic complexity measures 3
2.3 Previous studies on syntactic complexity 4
3 Research Methodology 8
3.1 Research Questions 8
3.2 Subjects 8
3.3 Instrument 8
3.4 Data Collection 9
3.5 Data Analysis 9
4 Results and Discussion 10
4.1 Overall complexity 10
4.2 Subordination complexity 10
4.3 Phrasal complexity 11
Conclusion 13
Acknowledgements 14
References 15
Table 2.1 Syntactic complexity measures 4
Table 4.1 Differences in overall complexity (W/T) 10
Table 4.2 Differences in Subordination complexity (C/T) 11
Table 4.3 Differences in phrasal complexity (W/C) 12
1 Introduction
1.1 Background
Writing is considered as one of the most crucial ways to measure English language learner’s proficiency, for it is an important language output. However, during real English teaching process, writing has been proved to be a weak link among college students. For many years, researchers have been studying second language writing in order to find the problems causing this phenomenon and work out effective ways to improve second language learner’s performance in English writing.