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Abstract

This article outlines three approaches to measuring the syntactic complexity in L2 English writing – mean length-based, distance dependency, and the use of non-finite elements. Studies using these approaches are discussed, and areas for future research are discussed.

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Towards an Organic Approach to Investigating CAF in Instructed SLA: The Case of Complexity

L. Ortega, J Norris (2009)

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Automatic analysis of syntactic complexity in second language writing

Xiaofei Lu (2010)

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 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 differentiate between different proficiency levels