Author(s)

Li Yingqi

Corresponding Author

Li Yingqi

Abstract

To explore the variation characteristics of the complexity of primary and secondary school students’ written sentences, this paper collected students’ compositions from every grade. It used eight measurement indexes: mean length of terminable TC-unit, complex terminable TC-unit/all the terminable TC-units, complex terminable TC-unit/simple terminable TC-unit, syntactic structure grade, mean length of single TC-unit, single TC-units per terminable TC-unit, the density of the modifiers and coreferential zero. The finding is that the syntactic complexity of primary and secondary school students’ compositions increases continuously, with inflexion points and fluctuations at certain stages.

Keywords

Syntactic complexity, Tc-unit, Primary and secondary school students, Written language