Understanding Advanced Level Academic Writing on Syntactic Complexity

Recent publications have highlighted the combination of large-grained and fine-grained indices to tap into syntactic complexity, while few studies have examined the writing produced by more advanced academic writers from a cross‐linguistic perspective. This paper reports on a corpus-based comparison of the native speaker (NS) and the Chinese advanced academic writers’ written abstracts. Using 120 texts within the discipline of applied linguistics, the study analyzed the extent to which the Chinese and the native writers’ writing differedin 16 measures of syntactic complexity. The article also compared across levels of English language proficiency and language background. The results revealed significant differences in subordination, with the NS professional groupgenerated more subordination than the Chinese professional writer group. Within-group comparisons yielded statistically significant differences in fine-grained syntactic complexity for the Chinese group. These results showconsiderable differences between the Chinese academic writers and native speakers reside in the distribution of subordination. The results have implications for incorporating subordination to writing instruction for L2writers at more advanced level