A Review of Syntactic Complexity Studies in Context of EFL/ESL Writing

Vol. 12, No. 10, 2022, Pg. 441 454 Abstract This paper reviews more than 60 research papers, articles, or book chapters on syntactic complexity in the context of EFL/ESL writing in the past two decades. Most of the papers are from journals indexed in Social Science Citation Index, Scopus, and Chinese Social Science Citation Index. Five strands of syntactic complexity studies in the context of EFL/ESL writing are concluded: syntactic complexity measurement indices and tools, the relationship between syntactic complexity and language proficiency, syntactic complexity developmental studies, comparative studies, and variables influencing syntactic complexity. Gaps in previous studies and future research focuses are analyzed and concluded: new indices from other syntactic perspectives should be considered and research on their validity and reliability should be done. For comparative studies, more attention should be given to comparing the writing of EFL/ESL learners with different backgrounds. For research on variables influencing syntactic complexity, the interactive effect of multiple variables needs to be investigated; if only one variable is examined, other variables should be controlled. Besides, in future syntactic complexity research, theoretical interpretation and theory building should be given more attention, and the observation period for longitudinal research should be extended. Finally, more qualitative studies are needed for in-depth investigation of specific syntactic perspectives, such as syntactic errors. writing scores as the dependent variable and syntactic elaboration and diversity indices as explanatory variables. The results showed that the explanatory variables can explain 45.3% of the variance in EFL writing scores. In their study, the syntactic elaboration indices are traditional syntactic complexity indices provided by L2SCA , while the syntactic diversity measured by the corrected type -token ratio of dependency relations” (p. 1). This is a new metric proposed by them and it is reported that this can significantly predict the EFL writing quality. coordination, and subordination, belong to the categories of syntactic fluency and complexity. Syntactic accuracy, indicated by the percentage of syntactic errors, has been seldom examined. More in-depth qualitative studies on syntactic errors should be investigated in the future. This review paper concludes the five strands of syntactic complexity studies in the context of EFL/ESL writing: syntactic complexity measurement indices and tools, the relationship between syntactic complexity and language proficiency, syntactic complexity developmental studies, comparative studies, and variables influencing syntactic complexity. It draws out a clear framework of syntactic complexity studies in the literature. This study also proposed some deficiencies in current syntactic complexity studies, which provides the gaps and points out the direction for future research. Finally, this review study can provide a reference for future research on syntactic complexity in the context of EFL/ESL writing and help teachers to evaluate the quality of EFL/ESL writing from a syntactic perspective. However, this study also has the following limitation: different research results have been obtained on each strand of syntactic studies due to different research subjects, objects, methods, and designs, while the differences are not in-depth compared and analyzed. Meta-analysis can be applied to review research in future syntactic studies.