A Corpus‐Based Evaluation of Syntactic Complexity Measures as Indices of College‐Level ESL Writers' Language Development

This article reports results of a corpus‐based evaluation of 14 syntactic complexity measures as objective indices of college‐level English as a second language (ESL) writers' language development. I analyzed large‐scale ESL writing data from the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (Wen, Wang, & Liang, 2005) using a computational system designed to automate syntactic complexity measurement with 14 measures that have been proposed in second language writing development studies (Lu, 2010). This analysis allows us to investigate the impact of sampling condition on the relationship between syntactic complexity and language development, to identify measures that significantly differentiate between…