A Corpus-Based analysis of syntactic complexity in students' essays
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Date
2021
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Université Oum El Bouaghi
Abstract
Syntactic complexity is an interesting aspect that governs the development of English
as a foreign language learners, who still struggle with it and generally use simple
syntactic structures while writing their essays, namely argumentative essays, and
many factors intervene, such as personality. Specifically, the objective of this study is
to investigate and compare the syntactic complexity within corpora of argumentative
essays written by third year students (six introverts and six extroverts) at the
department of English, Larbi Ben M'hidi University. In order to reach such aim, the
personality type was checked using the online Mayers-Briggs Type Indicator
personality test, and the analysis procedure was held using fourteen syntactic
complexity measures in Lu's )2010( Second Language Syntactic Complexity
Analyzer and in Kyle's (2016) Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic
Sophistication and Complexity, and the data was statistically analysed through the
Hotelling's T2 test in the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences. It was found that
syntactic complexity differs between the two groups, with introvert students having
higher means in all of the measures, and the Hotelling's T2 test fits the data and was
significant. The findings, thus, confirmed the alternative hypothesis which states that
there is a significant difference in the syntactic complexity within the argumentative
essays written by third year introvert and extrovert students. It was concluded that the
introvert personality influences students' syntactic complexity while writing
argumentative essays and boosts it more than its extrovert counterpart.
Description
Keywords
Argumentative essay, Syntactic complexity