The Relationship between Syntactic Complexity and Writing Quality of Chinese EFL Learners

This study analyzes the relationship between syntactic complexity and writing quality. The undergraduate participants were required to compose argumentations which were further divided into three level groups. The unit length including T-unit length and clause length, unit complexity including T-unit complexity ratio and dependent clause ratio, clauses and reduced structures are measured to find the difference across three levels and their relationship with the writing quality respectively. The result shows that unit length, unit complexity and the frequency of clauses increase with the improvement of writing quality. The frequency of adverbial clauses and object clauses discriminates middle and lower groups, while the frequency of attributive clauses discriminates higher group and middle group. The frequency of adverbial phrases is significantly different across the three groups. But there is no significant difference across the three groups in the nominal verb phrases. Except for objective clauses, appositive clauses and nominal verb phrases, other types of clauses and phrases are in the positive correlation with writing quality.