Characteristics of Junior High School Students’ : Writing in English

The present paper focuses on the measuring of syntactic maturity in written production among Swedish high school students. One way of doing such an analysis is by studying the students’ use of subordinate clauses. Johansson & Geisler (2011) have shown that students’ increased use of subordination in the form of relative clauses, adverbial and nominal clauses is a reliable indicator of syntactic progression. When analyzing the essays written by junior high school students, I found that the Subordinate Clause Index was a safe indicator when measuring linguistic complexity. The students’ abilities to lengthen clauses through the use of premodifiers was limited. Besides these tools of measuring syntactic maturity, I have studied how the students construct and coordinate clauses and sentences. I found the tendency among the students to treat dependent clauses as if they were independent, and a frequent use of coordinating conjunctions and commas to connect independent clauses