On September 3, 2019,“Syntactic complexity development in the writings of EFL learners: Insights from a dependency syntactically-annotated corpus”, a paper of the team led by Prof. Jiang Jingyang from SIS, was published in Journal of Second Language Writing, a renowned international linguistics journal. Bi Peng, a Ph.D student of SIS, is one of the major authors.
Journal of Second Language Writing, a top journal on applied linguistics by Elsevier, publishes papers on second language writing. The journal has ranked in the Q1 section of linguistic journals for years and ranked second among 180-odd linguistic journals of SSCI for two consecutive years. Its JCR impact factor in 2018 was as high as 4.2, beyond some journals on science and engineering. This quarterly journal publishes four issues a year, each including eight papers out of a huge number of contributions. Due to rigid review, few original research papers of domestic scholars have been published so far.
期刊影响因子（图）Impact Factor 期刊影响因子排名（图）Impact Factor Ranking
This study mainly explores the differences between writings of beginners and intermediate L2 English learnersin syntactic complexity. Compared with earlier studies, this study has four innovations: the emphasis on beginners and intermediate EFL learners, adoption of more concrete microscopic complexity indexes, usage of syntactically-annotated corpora on the basis of dependency grammar, and focus on dynamic development of syntactic complexity under Dynamic System Theory(DST). In terms of research methods,by virtue of dependency treebank, this studymakes it more convenient, accurate and efficient to extract the syntactic structure of learners’ corpus. The study is also significant theoretically: further the application of Dynamic System Theory(DST) in the L2 research. As learners go through different stages of SLA, their syntactic repertoire also presents dynamic changes, which may be captured by different syntactic complexity measures. Therefore, it is unrealistic and unscientific to measure the writings of all learners with the same indicator.
Congratulations to Bi Peng! Congratulations to Prof. Jiang Jingyang!
论文首页（图）
The first page of the paper (photo)
School of International Studies
September 6, 2019
Translated by Zheng Wenhui and Liu Liu
Edited by Xu Xueying
