Abstract
This study examined the relationship between the syntactic complexity of EFL writing and writing quality as judged by human raters. It also explored the role of topics in the relationship. The data set used was 320 argumentative essays produced by EFL learners taken from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE). These essays were analyzed using eight syntactic complexity measures with the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer. The complexity indices and writing scores of the essays were quantitatively analyzed. The result indicated strong topic effects on the majority of syntactic complexity measures. There were significant changes across different proficiency levels in phrasal-level measures but not in clause-level measures. In comparison to essays on the smoking topic, essays on the part-time job topic showed a significantly greater overall T-unit complexity, particularly at more advanced proficiency levels. However, there were no statistical differences in overall sentence complexity. Concerning the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality, global features including Mean Length of Sentence (MLS) and Mean Length of T-unit (MLT) were found to have a significant, positive relationship with writing scores across both topics. At the local level, though, the correlations varied considerably between syntactic measures.
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