Linguistic complexity in high-school students’ EFL writing
This study examined the syntactic and semantic complexity of L2 English writing in a Bosnian- Herzegovinian high school. Forty texts written by individual students, ten per grade, were quanti-tatively analyzed by applying methods established in previous research. The syntactic portion of the analys...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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University of Tuzla, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
2025-01-01
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| Series: | ExELL (Explorations in English Language and Linguistics) |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://exell.untz.ba/index.php/exell/article/view/59 |
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| Summary: | This study examined the syntactic and semantic complexity of L2 English writing in a Bosnian- Herzegovinian high school. Forty texts written by individual students, ten per grade, were quanti-tatively analyzed by applying methods established in previous research. The syntactic portion of the analysis, based on the t-unit analysis introduced by Hunt (1965), was done using the Web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010), while the semantic portion, largely based on the theory laid out in systemic functional linguistics (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2014), was done using the Web-based Lexical Complexity Analyzer (Ai & Lu, 2010) as well as manual identifica-tion of grammatical metaphors. The statistical analysis included tests of variance, correlation, and effect size. It was found that the syntactic and semantic complexity of writing increases in later grades; however, this increase is not consistent across all grades.
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| ISSN: | 2303-4858 |