Structural complexity research has often focussed on global measures of subordination and attempted to find universal trends and benchmarks for developmental stages. Recently, researchers have pointed out the need to distinguish between different types of subordinate clauses as they may have different developmental trajectories (Lambert and Kormos 2014, Vercellotti and Packer 2016) and to take into account L1 influence (Lu and Ai 2015, Ortega 2015) and individual variation (Larsen-Freeman 2009). The novelty of the present study consists in combining all of these factors and making a finer distinction between clause types than what is normal in complexity research. The data come from texts collected for the TRAWL Corpus, a longitudinal corpus currently under construction, containing L2 English, French, German and Spanish texts written by Norwegian school children as part of their normal school work. A subset of the students have also contributed texts in their L1 Norwegian. The study addresses the following research questions:
- How does Norwegian learners’ L2 English writing complexity develop over time with respect to different types of subordinate clauses?
- Can L1 effects be detected in comparison with L1 English writers of similar ages?
- Are there individual differences, and can these be connected to differences in the learners’ L1 writing?
The study focuses on five students who have currently contributed texts from the three years of lower secondary school and the first year of upper secondary school (age 13–17). The English and Norwegian texts produced by these students were manually coded for clause types and their syntactic function. A case study of five focal students allows for a detailed comparison of individual differences. To address the question of L1 influence, the data are compared with L1 English texts produced by writers of a similar age from the Growth in Grammar Corpus (Durrant and Brenchley 2018). The authors have kindly made available the annotated part of the corpus, which contains information about clause types and functions.
The results show that the learners use a wide range of subordinate clauses when they start lower secondary school, although nominal wh-clauses, -ing clauses and past participle clauses are less frequent than that-clauses, relative clauses, adverbial clauses and infinitive clauses. The use of all kinds of clauses increases over time, but there is a reduction in the use of that-clauses over the last year.
The frequencies from the first and last years of lower secondary school were compared with years 9 and 11 from the Growth in Grammar Corpus (which contains data from years 2, 6, 9 and 11 in the British school system). The L2 learners had a lower frequency of subordination overall, but the difference was most pronounced for -ing clauses, indicating cross-linguistic influence from Norwegian, which does not have a proper equivalent to this type of clause.
All five learners increase their use of subordination over time, but there are individual differences in the kinds of subordinate clauses responsible for this growth. For example, one student has her largest increase in the number of adjectival relative clauses, whereas another has a more even increase for all types of clauses in addition to being one of two students to show a more marked increase of -ing clauses in the final year.
The Norwegian L1 data have not yet been analysed, but will shed light on the question of whether the learners’ lower subordination rate in English (compared to L1 English writers of similar ages) is due to influence from their L1 or is rather an effect of lagging behind in the L2. The Norwegian data will also be used to examine whether the individual differences in the L2 English data could be due to individual preferences in clause connection across languages.
The preliminary results confirm the need to take into account both L1 influence and individual differences in complexity research and for distinguishing between different types of subordinate clauses. They contribute to a more detailed picture of the development of L2 complexity that will also be of value for teachers and the developers of teaching materials.
References:
Durrant, Philip and Mark Brenchley. 2018. Growth in Grammar Corpus. Available from gigcorpus.com.
Lambert, Craig and Judit Kormos. 2014. “Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency in Task-based L2 Research: Toward More Developmentally Based Measures of Second Language Acquisition.” Applied Linguistics 35: 607–614.
Larsen-Freeman, Diane. 2009. “Adjusting Expectations: The Study of Complexity, Accuracy, and Fluency in Second Language Acquisition.” Applied Linguistics 30: 579–589.
Lu, Xiaofei and Haiyang Ai. 2015. “Syntactic Complexity in College-level English Writing: Differences among Writers with Diverse L1 Backgrounds.” Journal of Second Language Writing 29: 16–27.
Ortega, Lourdes. 2015. “Syntactic Complexity in L2 Writing: Progress and Expansion.” Journal of Second Language Writing 29: 82–94.
Vercellotti, Mary Lou and Jessica Packer. 2016. “Shifting Structural Complexity: The Production of Clause Types in Speeches Given by English for Academic Purposes Students.” Journal of English for Academic Purposes 22: 179–190.