Chabane, RoumeissaGuemini, TakieddineChaira, Farid2024-05-202024-05-202023http://dspace.univ-oeb.dz:4000/handle/123456789/19441There have been a growing number of scholarly investigations which state that the syntactic complexity displayed by EFL learners in their written output could serve as a reliable indicator of their writing competence. Syntactic complexityis a critical element in the writings of these learners who usually struggle to produce complex structures. Therefore, they often resort to simpler forms, especially in their dissertations. The level of syntactic complexity in these works can be affected by multiple factors, and recent research suggests that one of these factors is their field of study. Proceeding from this premise,the present studyaims to uncover any significant distinctions in the syntactic complexity of the general introductions extracted from selected dissertations in the literature and civilisation subfields. These dissertations were written by Algerian postgraduates at Larbi Ben M'hidi University (Oum El Bouaghi)over the past ten academic years. To examine the syntactic complexity of the introductions, a corpus-comparative approach waschosen. Two robust automated analysis tools, the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (L2SCA) and the Tool for Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC), were employed to assess a corpus of 70 introductory sections. These tools were used to examine ten indices of syntactic complexity divided into large-grained and fine-grained metrics. The numerical results were then compared using a MANOVA and subsequent univariate tests to further investigate the research questions. The findings revealed a significant overall difference in syntactic complexity between the two disciplines, with the civilisation group attaining greater scores on the majority of indices. Importantly, the discipline showed a significant large effect on dependents per nominal and dependents per object of the preposition, emphasising the importance of phrasal complexity in L2 academic writing evaluation. In light of these outcomes, notable disciplinary inequalities in the usage of syntactically complex structures were discussed, as were the implications of these outcomes for EFL writing research and pedagogy.enCorpus; Civilisation; Literature; Syntactic Complexity; Writing ProficiencyOther