Measuring Written Syntactic Patterns of Second Language Learners of German

Cooper, Thomas C.

doi:10.1080/00220671.1976.10884868

Cited by 82 publications

(79 citation statements)

References 2 publications

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“…Hence, the findings lend support for the contention of Iwashita et al (2008) that minimal subordination is an indicator of less complex text. Moreover, these findings partly support the contention of Cooper (1976) and Wolfe-Quintero et al (1998) that a non-linear complexification in subordination exists. It can be observed as well that the structural complexity of MCRPs shows variability.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Comparing the Linguistic Complexity in Receptive and Productive Modes

Barrot

2015

GEMA

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Several studies have investigated linguistic complexity as an index of proficiency and across genres. However, very little research has been conducted in determining the difference between the linguistic complexity during receptive and productive modes. This study, therefore, attempts to fill in such a gap by providing evidence on whether the linguistic complexity that pupils can process during receptive mode is higher than what they can utilize during productive mode. Specifically, this study sought to determine the linguistic complexity level of learners' written narratives (i.e. productive mode) and reading passages most comprehensible to them (MCRPs) (i.e. receptive mode) and whether all linguistic complexity indices in MCRPs are higher than the linguistic complexity indices in written narratives. To address these objectives, this study used a narrative film to elicit the written narratives from the participants via story reconstruction. Eight graded narrative reading passages were also used to determine the most comprehensible reading passage via multiplechoice test. Using a microstructure analysis tool, the findings suggest that while the overall receptive linguistic complexity of Grades 2, 4, and 6 pupils is higher than their productive linguistic complexity, interestingly, not all indices of linguistic complexity are higher during productive mode. The implications of these findings for classroom teaching are considered more particularly in the selection of reading materials and the aspect of linguistic complexity that needs to be adjusted to facilitate comprehension. This paper, then, concludes with some research directions that would shed light on the receptive-productive dimensions of linguistic complexity.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 78%

Comparing the Linguistic Complexity in Receptive and Productive Modes

Barrot

2015

GEMA

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“…In some linguistic traditions, the notion of syntactic complexity has not extended to phrasal complexity (see, e.g., Givón (2009) ;Givón & Shibatan, 2009). However, in another view emerging in L1 and L2 developmental studies focusing on syntactic maturity (e.g., Cooper, 1976;Crossley, McNamara, Weston, & McLain Sullivan, 2011;Hunt, 1965;Lu, 2011;Ravid & Berman, 2010) and discourse analysis of texts in different genres (e.g., Biber, 2006;Biber, Gray, & Poonpon, 2011;Ravid & Berman, 2010), phrasal complexity (particularly noun phrase complexity) has been considered an integral part of syntactic complexity.…”

Section: Syntactic Complexity As a Multi-dimensional Constructmentioning

confidence: 99%

Different topics, different discourse: Relationships among writing topic, measures of syntactic complexity, and judgments of writing quality

Yang

Weigle

2015

Journal of Second Language Writing

240

101

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“…In line with the definition of clause, a dependent clause is defined as a finite adjective, adverbial, or nominal clause (Cooper 1976, Hunt 1965, Kameen 1979. This is operationalized using the Tregex pattern in (6), which matches an SBAR node that immediately dominates a finite clause (as defined in the pattern in (4) above).…”

Section: Sentencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Only adjective, adverb, noun, and verb phrases are counted in coordinate phrases (Cooper 1976). These are captured using the Tregex pattern in (10), which matches an adjective phrase (ADJP), adverb phrase (ADVP), noun phrase (NP), or verb phrase (VP) that immediately dominates a coordinating conjunction (CC).…”

confidence: 99%

Automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing

2010

IJCL

722

487

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We describe a computational system for automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing using fourteen different measures that have been explored or proposed in studies of second language development. The system takes a written language sample as input and produces fourteen indices of syntactic complexity of the sample based on these measures. The system is designed with advanced second language proficiency research in mind, and is therefore developed and evaluated using college-level second language writing data from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (Wen et al. 2005). Experimental results show that the system achieves a very high reliability on unseen test data from the corpus. We illustrate how the system is used in an example application to investigate whether and to what extent each of these measures significantly differentiates between different proficiency levels.

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Measuring Written Syntactic Patterns of Second Language Learners of German

Cited by 82 publications

References 2 publications

Comparing the Linguistic Complexity in Receptive and Productive Modes

Comparing the Linguistic Complexity in Receptive and Productive Modes

Different topics, different discourse: Relationships among writing topic, measures of syntactic complexity, and judgments of writing quality

Automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing

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