縱向研究二語學習者三年學習中口語產出的詞匯豐富性和句法復雜性發(fā)展的動態(tài)模式(語言學翻譯-論文樣本)

1、<p>　　1. Introduction</p><p>　　Language development, which refers to characteristics of a learner’s output that reveal some point or stage along a developmental continuum (Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki &

2、Kim, 1998), moves along three dimensions: fluency, accuracy and complexity. As opposed to the other two dimensions, linguistic complexity, consisting of lexical complexity (also called lexical richness) and syntactic com

3、plexity, is most relevant to change and the opportunities for development and growth in the interlanguage system </p><p>　　1.1 Need for the study</p><p>　　Though a great number of studies have b

4、een carried out to investigate lexical richness or syntactic complexity separately at home and abroad (Hunt, 1970; Crowhurst, 1980,1983; Laufer, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1998; Bardovi-Harlig, 1992; Vermeer, 2000; Wu Xudong &

5、; Chen Xiaoqing, 2000; Ortega, 2003; Liu Donghong, 2003; Yu Hua, 2004; Wen Qiufang, 2006a, b; Qin Xiaoqing, 2007), studies on the developmental tendency of the lexical richness and syntactic complexity from a longitudina

6、l perspective as well as </p><p>　　This line of study should be undertaken in the Chinese context also because the corollary of it will have significant practical implications for L2 lexis and syntax instruc

7、tion. It is known that Chinese L2 teachers lay more emphasis on grammatical accuracy than on complexity both in instructing and assessing writing, which leads to L2 learners’ more frequent use of simple vocabulary and sy

8、ntactic structures, a detriment to their language development. At present, we still lack a clear picture of </p><p>　　1.2 Research purpose</p><p>　　This study is undertaken with the aim of explo

9、ring the developmental patterns of L2 learners’ lexical richness and syntactic complexity. Specifically, the purpose of the present study is three-fold: firstly, to reveal the developmental patterns of L2 learners’ lexic

10、al richness and syntactic complexity across three years; secondly, to compare the growth rates of lexical richness and syntactic complexity in their oral output at the two intervals; thirdly, to examine the relationship

11、between the L2</p><p>　　2. Literature review</p><p>　　In the field of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research, language competence can be studied from different aspects. As for productivity,

12、language competence can move along two dimensions: lexical complexity (also called lexical richness) and syntactic complexity. Additionally, according to Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998), complexity means that a wide variety

13、 or a wide range of both basic and sophisticated structures and words are available and can be accessed quickly. In Wolfe-Quintero’s definit</p><p>　　2.1 Lexical richness</p><p>　　Many scholars

14、(Linnarud, 1986; Nihanani, 1981; Hyltenstam, 1988; Engber, 1995) have done some researches on lexical richness. Laufer (1994) defined lexical richness as consisting of lexical variance, lexical density, lexical sophistic

15、ation and lexical originality. </p><p>　　Several types of ratio measures have been utilized in research on second language lexical development in writing. Lexical variance was measured by a type/token ratio

16、(Laufer, 1991). Lexical density was calculated by dividing the number of types by the number of lexical tokens (Engber, 1995). Lexical sophistication was measured by the ratio of the advanced lexemes to the total number

17、of words, as done in Engber (1995). Lexical originality was calculated by dividing the number of tokens unique to </p><p>　　Among these measures, lexical variation measure and lexical sophistication measure

18、are most frequently used. Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998) noted that lexical complexity was manifest in writing primarily in terms of the range (lexical variation) and size (lexical sophistication) of a second language writ

19、er’s productive vocabulary. They concluded that measures of lexical variation and sophistication appeared to best relate to second language development. Although lexical variation and sophisticatio</p><p>　　

20、2.1.1 Lexical variance</p><p>　　In Linnarud’s (1986) study, lexical variance was defined as the total number of different lexical items or word types divided by the total number of lexical words in a text. T

21、he subjects fell into two groups: the L2 learner group - 17-year-old Swedish learners (L2 high school juniors), and the native speaker group at the same school level. They were asked to write a picture description essay

22、in 40 minutes. Linnarud (1986) compared the compositions in lexical variance between the two groups. She </p><p>　　In Nihanani’s (1981) study, lexical variance was defined as the total number of different le

23、xical items divided by the total number of lexical words in a text. Nihanani (1981) collected the take-home essays written by L2 university students. She counted each lexical variance score based on the given definition

24、and had each essay holistically scored. The same result as Linnarud’s (1986) was found: there was no significant relationship between the holistic scores and lexical variance.</p><p>　　In Hyltenstam’s (1988)

25、 study, the L2 learners were second year high school students. They were asked to write a summary and response to a 20-minute film without time limit. Unlike Nihanani (1981) and Linnarud (1986), Hyltenstam (1988) control

26、led for the text length when calculating a lexical variance score. However, Hyltenstam (1988) found a similar result: there was no relationship between lexical variance and L2 writing quality.</p><p>　　In En

27、gber (1995) and Linnarud (1986), lexical variance was defined in the same way. However, Engber (1995) found a different result. In her study, the L2 learners were students at an intermediate to high-intermediate levels o

28、f language proficiency. They were required to write on the same topic within 35 minutes. The topic was chosen from a pool of topics that had been proven to be suitable for eliciting responses at different levels. She use

29、d a holistic scoring scheme to measure the quality of e</p><p>　　Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998, p. 109) held that this measure captured the intuition that second language writers at a higher proficiency level

30、will command a larger vocabulary size and will be able to use significantly more lexical word types than writers at a lower proficiency level.</p><p>　　2.1.2 Lexical sophistication</p><p>　　A nu

31、mber of researchers (Laufer, 1991; Linnarud, 1986; Liu Donghong, 2003) used lexical sophistication to measure how many low frequency or advanced words were used in a text.</p><p>　　Linnarud (1986) defined le

32、xical sophistication as the number of sophisticated lexical words divided by the total number of lexical words in a text and sophisticated lexical words as those English words that were generally introduced at grade 9 an

33、d above in the Swedish educational system. He found that native language writers used significantly more sophisticated words than second language writers (0.25 versus 0.21), but found a low correlation between the ratio

34、of sophisticated words and the hol</p><p>　　Laufer (1994) defined lexical sophistication as the ratio of the total number of sophisticated word types divided by the total number of word types. She analyzed f

35、our different measures of sophistication on pre- and post-compositions by two advanced university classes. In two of the analyses, she counted sophisticated words as words not on a 2000-word frequency list and words on a

36、 university-level word list, and found the measures significant for both groups. In the other two analyses, she count</p><p>　　Liu Donghong (2003) used the Lexical Frequency Profile in calculating lexical so

37、phistication scores. Unlike Linnarud (1986), she defined lexical sophistication as the number of sophisticated words divided by the total number of words tokens in a text. In her study, advanced words were defined as wor

38、ds in AWL and Off-list (beyond 2, 000). Her subjects were 57 second-year college students at a Chinese university. They were required to write on a given topic within 30 minutes. After the composition</p><p>

39、;　　To conclude, lexical sophistication explains lexical richness in terms of the size of a learner’s productive vocabulary (Wolfe-Quintero, et al., 1998, p. 101). The size is reflected by the use of advanced words (low f

40、requent words) in a text in that, high frequency words, used by both low and high level learners, cannot show the “size” difference between them while low frequency words are not shared by learners of different proficien

41、cy levels equally, i.e., high level students tend to use more l</p><p>　　2.2 Syntactic complexity</p><p>　　In Ortega’s (2003) study, syntactic complexity (also called syntactic maturity or lingu

42、istic complexity) referred to the range of forms that surfaced in language production and the degree of sophistication of such forms. This construct is important in second language research because of the assumption that

43、 language development entails, among other processes, the growth of an L2 learner’s syntactic repertoire and her or his ability to use that repertoire appropriately in a variety of situations. </p><p>　　Synt

44、actic complexity measures are of two types: those that analyze the clauses, sentences, or T-units in terms of each other (e.g., clauses per sentence, dependent clauses per T unit, T units per sentence); and those that an

45、alyze the presence of specific grammatical structures in relation to clauses, T units, or sentences (e.g., passives per sentences, Kameen, 1979; complex nominals per T-unit, Cooper, 1976). </p><p>　　In the p

46、ast two decades, these various measures of syntactic complexity were used by many researchers (Cragg & Nation, 2006; Nippold, Hesketh, & Duthie, 2005; Nippold, Mansfield, & Billow, 2007; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Q

47、uintero et al, 1998). Wolfe-Quintero et al. (1998) looked cumulatively at the strength of the T-unit, mean length of clause, clauses per T-unit, dependent clauses per clause and many other indices of syntactic complexity

48、 and concluded that clauses per T-unit (C/T) and dependent claus</p><p>　　2.2.1 T-unit complexity ratio</p><p>　　Hunt (1965) first developed the T-unit as a measure of children’s syntactic matur

49、ity in writing, defining the T-unit as a minimal terminable unit consisting of a main (independent) clause plus whatever subordinate clauses and phrases that happen to be attached to and embedded within it. Following Hu

50、nt (1965, 1970), T-unit is used as the production unit in this study.</p><p>　　The T-unit complexity ratio is to measure how grammatically complex the writing of a learner is, under the assumption that the m

51、ore clauses per T-unit there are, the more complex the writing is (Wolfe-Quintero, 1998). However, the previous studies based on it found mixed results. Some of them found a significant relationship between proficiency a

52、nd the T-unit complexity ratio while others did not.</p><p>　　Hirano (1991) found a relationship between program level and clauses per T-unit, but not between CELT scores and clauses per T-unit. Cooper (1976

53、) and Monroe (1975) found a relationship between school level and clauses per T-unit. Flahive and Snow (1980) found a relationship between holistic ratings and clauses per T-unit for the first, second, third, and sixth p

54、rogram levels, but not for the fourth or fifth levels. Bardovi-Harling and Bofman (1989) and Perkins (1980) did not find a relationship</p><p>　　Generally speaking, T-unit complexity ratio (C/T) is a compara

55、tively reliable index of syntactic complexity among all of the developmental indices. However, it is found that it neglects verb phrases, another kind of grammatical structures reflecting syntactic complexity as well. As

56、 a consequence, an advanced T-unit complexity ratio (C+VP)/T is proposed and will be adopted in the present study to measure syntactic complexity. </p><p>　　2.2.2 DC/C</p><p>　　The dependent cla

57、use ratio is a measure that examines the degree of embedding in a text, by counting the number of dependent clauses as a percentage of the total number of clauses (DC/C). It should be pointed out that few researchers def

58、ined clearly what they meant by dependent clauses in their studies except Kameen (1979), who implied in his discussion that they included adverbial, adjective, and nominal clauses. </p><p>　　Among previous r

59、elated studies, Hirano (1991)’s study found that this measure significantly differentiated all three program levels based on CELT score ranges, but only weakly correlated with CELT scores themselves. Such a result was fo

60、und for many measures, which means that the actual scores were not directly related to a measure such as this but that writers with the same proficiency range did have something in common on this and other measures. Her

61、three groups ranged from average of .18 (low</p><p>　　2.3 Problems in the previous studies</p><p>　　Although researches in lexical richness and syntactic complexity increase in number and come u

62、p with a lot of interesting results, there are still some problems in the previous studies. </p><p>　　First of all, most of the extant studies on lexical richness and/or syntactic complexities are cross-sect

63、ional ones (Crowhurst, 1980, 1983; Bardovi-Harlig, 1992; Wu Xudong & Chen Xiaoqing, 2000; Liu Donghong, 2003; Yu Hua, 2004; Qin Xiaoqing, 2007) and longitudinal ones are much rarer (Wen Qiufang 2006a, b). </p>

64、<p>　　What’s more, in recent years, researchers at home and abroad show an increasing interest in L2 learners’ writing performance (Engber 1995; James 2002; Laufer 1991, 1998; Shaw & Liu 1998; Li Jinquan; Cai J

65、inting, 2001; Ni Lan, 2000), but only few of them (Altman, 1997; Wen Qiufang 2003, 2004) focus on the oral performance of L2 learners.</p><p>　　Additionally, in Wolfe-Quintero (1998)’s synthesis of literatur

66、e review on all the previous studies of developmental indexes, it was concluded that C/T and DC/C are two discriminant indicators of syntactic complexity with high construct validity. However, both of the two mainly focu

67、s on the degree of subordinating and diametrically neglect verbal phrases, including participles, gerunds and infinitives, which could reflect complexity of syntactic constructions in oral or written data as well. Thu<

68、;/p><p>　　Lastly, quite a few studies investigate the relationship among three dimensions of language development: fluency, accuracy and complexity or the relationship between any two of them (Yu Hua, 2004; Qin

69、 Xiaoqing, 2007), or compare the lexical richness and syntactic complexity of Chinese L2 learners with those of international L2 learners (Li Changsheng, 2007) or with native speakers (Wen Qiufang, 2006a; Zhang Ping, 200

70、7), and yet the dynamic and interactive research on the developmental patterns o</p><p>　　To sum up, the previous empirical studies are rather fragmentary, making it hard to draw consistent general conclusio

71、ns, which will justify the need for the present study.</p><p>　　3. Methodology</p><p>　　3.1 Research questions </p><p>　　The current study investigates the developmental patterns of

72、 L2 learners’ lexical richness and syntactic complexity along their three years’ learning, different growth rates of them and the relationship between them in the three years. The specific research questions are as follo

73、ws:</p><p>　　(1) Do the L2 learners increase their lexical richness and syntactic complexity in three years? </p><p>　　(2) Are there any great differences in the growth rates of the L2 learners’

74、 lexical richness and syntactic complexity at the first interval (from Year One to Year Two) and the second interval (from Year Two to Year Three)? </p><p>　　(3) Is there any relationship between the L2 lear

75、ners’ lexical richness and their syntactic complexity in each year?</p><p>　　3.2 Variables and operational definitions</p><p>　　3.2.1 Lexical richness</p><p>　　Lexical richness is m

76、easured in terms of two most revealing indices: lexical variance (LV) and lexical sophistication (LS) in this study.</p><p>　　Lexical variance (LV) is defined as the type/token ratio (TTR), i.e., the ratio i

77、n percentage between the different lexemes (types) in the test and the total number of words (tokens) (Laufer, 1991; 1994a, b). When this study counted types, the different inflectional forms of a word were regarded as o

78、ne lexeme, for instance, ‘run, runs, running and ran’ were counted as the same lexeme ‘run’. For this purpose, the online lemmatizer (http://nl2.ijs.si/analyze/cgi/testlem.cgi.) would be adopted to p</p><p>

79、　　The formula is </p><p>　　Lexical sophistication (LS) is defined as the percentage of “advanced words” in the text. What is labeled “advanced” would depend on the level of the learners tested (Laufer, 1991)

80、. In our study, which examines the spoken data of L2 learners, advanced vocabulary was taken to be the Base wordlist 2 (998 word families, 3708 words), Base wordlist 3 (570 word families, 3107 words) and the words Not In

81、 Lists, excluding the incorrect ones, in Range designed by P. Nation & A. Coxhead (2002) (http:// ww</p><p>　　3.2.2 Syntactic complexity</p><p>　　Syntactic complexity is defined as great len

82、gth and subordination of T-unit. Approaches to syntactic complexity in this study are of ratio type instead of frequency one, for it has been pointed out that frequency measures may be doubtful because of the lack of a f

83、ixed delimiter and quite a few related experimental studies could not lend their support to them. Therefore, based on the literature review, the modified T-unit complexity ratio ((C + VP) / T) and dependent clause ratio

84、(DC/C) with high</p><p>　　CV/T = (C + VP) / T</p><p>　　DC/C = DC/C</p><p>　　Notes: T= T-units; C=clauses; VP= verbal phrases; DC=Dependent clauses.</p><p>　　The terms i

85、n the formulas need explanation. T-unit is used as the basic unit of ratio analysis of syntactic complexity in the present study. T-units rather than C-units are used because the task performance is monologic and contain

86、s few elided utterances (See Foster, Tonkyn & Wigglesworth, 2000, for a discussion of the relative merits of using T-units or C-units). Following Hunt (1970), a T-unit is seen as one main or independent clause plus w

87、hatever subordinate or dependent clauses are attached</p><p>　　A clause is operationalized as a structure with an overt subject and a finite verb (Hunt, 1965) in this study. This definition of clause include

88、s independent / main clauses, as well as three types of dependent/subordinate clauses: adverbial clauses, adjective/relative clauses, and nominal clauses. Following Bardovi-Harlig and Bofman (1989)’s definition of Verb p

89、hrase (VP), it can be classified as three types: participle, gerund, and infinitive in this study while dependent clauses (DC) are defin</p><p>　　In counting these units, this study made a modification. As i

90、n the oral tests, there are some repeated fillers or false starts on account of hesitation, self-correction, etc., which may affect the measurement of syntactic complexity, the researcher excluded them from each oral sam

91、ple when tagging the transcribed texts.</p><p>　　3.3 Data collection</p><p>　　The participants in this study were 50 English majors who were enrolled in a key university in 2001 and asked to com

92、plete an oral task by producing a three-minute monologue after three minutes’ preparation in a language lab. Their spoken English data was collected three times in December of the year 2001, 2002 and 2003, and then trans

93、cribed for further data analysis. The topics for their oral tasks were all argumentative, rather similar in nature and relative to their college life. The reasons f</p><p>　　Table 3.1 Description of the oral

94、 data</p><p>　　3.4 Data analysis</p><p>　　Analysis of the transcribed oral data consists of four stages: applying Wordsmith 4.0 to calculate the value of lexical variance in each essay and Range

95、 32 to obtain that of advanced lexemes and the overall tokens for lexical sophistication in the same essay; tagging indexes concerning syntactic complexity including T-units, clauses, verb phrases and dependent clauses;

96、computation of lexical sophistication and syntactic complexity measures according to the corresponding formulae; calculation of </p><p>　　After attaining all the lexical richness and syntactic complexity ind

97、ices of the data sets, the researcher applied a multivariate analysis and T-test in SPSS 13.0 to compare the differences of L2 learners’ lexical and syntactic complexity in three years and of their growth rates in the tw

98、o consecutive periods (Year1-Year 2; Year 2-Year 3). Then Pearson correlation analysis was made to find out whether there was a significant relationship between the L2 learners’ lexical richness and that of thei</p>