An Analysis of Syntactic Complexity Used in Essay Writing Produced by EFL Writers
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Abstract
The purpose of the study was to investigate the syntactic complexity of English essay writing of English learners and the clause types produced by these EFL writers. The participants were 49 third-year English major undergraduate students who enrolled in essay writing course (205223), at Naresuan University, Thailand. They were asked to do an argumentative essay writing test by choosing only one of the three given topics. Then, their essay scripts were collected and analyzed by looking at 1) the ratio of clause per T-unit (C/T), 2) the ratio of dependent clauses per clause (DC/C), and 3) the ratio of dependent clauses per T-units (DC/T). It was found that these syntactic complexity measures are proved to be feasible measures to explore the syntactic complexity of writing learners, and noun clauses were produced the most, followed by adverb clauses and adjective clauses, respectively. This study provides further pedagogical implications and recommendations in response to the findings, particularly for EFL writing instruction at the sentence level.
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ข้อความรู้ใดๆ ตลอดจนข้อคิดเห็นใดๆ เป็นของผู้เขียนแต่ละท่านโดยเฉพาะ คณะมนุษยศาสตร์ มหาวิทยาลัยนเรศวร และกองบรรณาธิการวารสารมนุษยศาสตร์ฯ ไม่จำเป็นต้องเห็นพ้องด้วย
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