A corpus-based comparison of syntactic complexity in academic writing of L1 and L2 English students across years and disciplines

Abstract

Syntactic complexity, widely acknowledged as a key predictor of writing quality, has gained increasing attention in the realm of academic writing. A notable line of inquiry has centered on the factors that potentially influence syntactic complexity in academic writing. Instead of attending to one factor, the study focuses on multiple factors to examine how language background affects syntactic complexity across years and disciplines. Specifically, it compares the syntactic complexity in English academic writing between L1 English and L1 Chinese university students across four years and/or three disciplines. Fine-grained indices, which include five clausal indices and eight phrasal indices, are utilized to capture specific syntactic features for a full understanding and description of the syntactic preferences shown by L1 English and L1 Chinese students in academic discourse. The results revealed that L1 English students tended to produce more noun phrases in academic writing than L1 Chinese students with the increase of years. Additionally, both cohorts of students followed similar syntactic patterns in cross-disciplinary contexts, with highly frequent use of complex nominals in the Physical Sciences and clausal structures in the Social Sciences. In instances where language background, year, and discipline interact, texts produced by Chinese English learners exhibited reliance on the syntactic features of adverbial clauses, attributive adjectives, and pre-modifying nouns across all disciplines in the early years of their academic journey. Ultimately, some pedagogical implications for academic writing courses are put forward in an attempt to provide valuable insights for enhancing academic literacy among both L1 and L2 students.