How can writing instructors develop their learner’s syntactic complexity in the L2 classroom? The researcher used a mixed methods design to examine the effects of three types of tasks on the development of complexity. The results indicated that tasks that focus learners’ attention on syntactic aspects of language are more effective.
Syntactic complexity is considered a critical construct in language teaching and research because of the parallel relationship between the development of this factor and overall L2 proficiency (Ai & Lu, 2013; Ortega, 2003). The importance of the construct has continued to generate ongoing interest in several areas as evidenced by numerous publications over the past few decades (Kyle & Crossley, 2018; Yoon, 2017; Ai & Lu, 2015; Bulté & Housen, 2014; Ellis & Yuan, 2004). However, to this day no research has compared how tasks can encourage learners’ development of syntactic complexity in the classroom. The researcher used a mixed methods approach to investigate the effect of three different writing tasks on the development of the written syntactic complexity and its relationship to writing quality. The quantitative component involved 105 first-year lower-intermediate Japanese university students, who were randomly assigned to either an experimental group practicing translation or sentence-combining or a control group practicing timed-writing. Writing samples were gathered at three points across one academic year and analyzed. For the qualitative component, seven students were selected from the experimental treatment groups to participate in think-aloud protocols. Analysis involved both statistical tests and qualitative coding. The quantitative results demonstrated that the sentence-combining group made more significant gains across time and did significantly better on measures of syntactic complexity than the other two groups. These results indicated that sentence-combining can hasten the development of complexity, at least in terms of coordination. The qualitative component revealed that the quantitative results were likely attributed to the differences in how much attention learners paid to either syntactic and lexical aspects of sentences during the tasks. The overall results will be discussed in terms of implications for the use of sentence writing activities to develop complexity in L2 writing.
