States of Complexity. Syntactic Complexity in the English Essays of Czech Gymnasium Students

WILLIAMS, Christopher. States of Complexity. Syntactic Complexity in the English Essays of Czech Gymnasium Students. In Digital English Worldwide: Corpus and discourse analyses. 2022.

Basic information

• Original name: States of Complexity. Syntactic Complexity in the English Essays of Czech Gymnasium Students
• Authors: WILLIAMS, Christopher.
• Edition: Digital English Worldwide: Corpus and discourse analyses, 2022.

Other information

• Original language: English
• Type of outcome: Presentations at conferences
• Field of Study: 50301 Education, general; including training, pedagogy, didactics [and education systems]
• Country of publisher: Germany
• Confidentiality degree: is not subject to a state or trade secret
• Organization unit: Faculty of Education

Abstract

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, and fine-grained distance-dependency measurements, using the Stanford dependency parser (Chen and Manning, 2014), to determine which measurements are the best indicators of proficiency as determined by each participating school’s marking rubric. These measurements are supported by interviews with teachers and questionnaires from students on the perceived view of complexity in student writing versus the reality. The teachers share their views on teaching writing, the typical strengths and weaknesses of students, and how writing proficiency is measured. Ultimately, the results of the complexity analyses, questionnaires, and interviews will provide an insight into the kinds of complexity features that should be taught and possibly considered as means for determining proficiency in gymnasium students.