The aim of this project is to replicate part of the research by Joyce, Ky and Eric, “Syntactic Complexity and Writing Quality in Students’ Technical Writing”, which was conducted with students in the School of Engineering.

The syntactic complexity of student writing in LANG2070 was investigated to determine what differences exist between levels of proficiency. This is so we can better understand where and how students’ academic writing can be developed and whether differences exist in the syntactic complexity of student writing between the disciplines of Engineering and Humanities and Social Sciences. For this project, the focus is on the complexity of noun phrases. 

A corpus of 12 student texts (1100 to 1300 words each) from 4 teachers on LANG2070 was created. The corpus contains 4 texts each from high, middle and low levels.  Each level was then analyzed using an automatic syntactic complexity tool to determine three measures of syntactic complexity.

Initial results show some difference in use of noun phrase complexity between the levels.  The next stages involve manually analyzing concordances from the corpus to determine the types of complex noun phrases used across the three levels and then compare this to the original research by Joyce, Ky and Eric.