Finding proficiency through complexity
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2022 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This presentation reports on the work in progress of a project measuring the syntactic complexity in the essays (n=136) of Czech students in their final year of gymnasium studies. With many previous writing complexity studies having been focused on advanced or university level L2 English users, the results of which may not be applicable to intermediate secondary school users (Lee et al, 2021), there is clear a need for an analysis on the written compositions produced in a school context. Syntactic complexity (SC) is generally understood as referring to the ‘range and sophistication’ (Ortega, 2015) of grammatical constructions. This study takes traditional length-based measurements, using Lu’s (2012) Complexity Analyzer, distance-dependency measurements using the Stanford dependency parser (Chen and Manning, 2014), and and fine-grained non-finite subordinate clause analysis, to determine which measurements are the best indicators of proficiency as determined by each participating school’s marking rubric. |