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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 Language Complexity in L2 Development
Language complexity is one of the characteristics of the development oflanguage. The study concerning language complexity includes two aspects: syntacticcomplexity and lexical complexity. This part focuses on the definition and measuresof these two facets. The term syntactic complexity is also named syntactic maturity or grammaticalcomplexity. Wolfe-Quintero (1998) used the term grammatical complexity, whilesome other researchers were prone to use the term syntactic complexity (Crowhurst,1980; Lantolf, 1988; Ortega, 2003; Beers, 2009) or syntactic maturity. (Silva Abchi &Borzone, 2010) This study adopts the term syntactic complexity as many researchersdid. With regard to syntactic complexity, different researchers had their owndefinitions, Foster & Skehan (1996) held the view that complexity should placeemphasis on the organization of what was said and paid attention to the progressivelymore elaborate language that may be utilized, as well as a greater variety of syntacticpatterning and in learner's part, they tended to restructure their language.Wolfe-Quintero (1998) mentioned that complexity referred to "utilizing a wide rangeof structures and vocabulary" and revealed the scope of expanding or restructuredsecond language knowledge. Later Ortega (2003) harbored the idea that syntacticcomplexity (also named syntactic maturity or linguistic complexity) referred to therange of forms that surface in language production and the degree of sophistication ofsuch forms. Ellis (2003, cited in Housen & Kuiken, 2009) took the attitudes thatcomplexity was 'the extent to which the language produced in performing a task iselaborate and varied '. As for me, I tend to believe that syntactic complexity is that thesentences or vocabulary that writers use are various and they do their utmost to usemore restructured patterns.
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2.2 Previous Research of the Development of Syntactic Complexity at Home and abroad
Some studies were conducted to examine the impacts of different grades,different levels or different genres on the various indexes of syntactic complexity.Crowhurst (1980) conducted a cross-sectional study on 240 students to explorewhether different genres, that is, narration and argumentation would exert significantinfluence on students' syntactic complexity. Meanwhile, Crowhurst further examinedwhether there were significant influence on the different grades. ( grade 6, 10, 12) Theresults showed that at each grade, T-unit in argument significantly outnumbered theone in narration and in argumentation the differences between grade 6 and grade 12and between grade 10 and grade 12 were both significant, whereas in narration theincrease between grade 6 and grade 12 was significant but the increase between grade 10 and grade 12 was not significant. Lantolf (1988) utilized qualitative indexes tomeasure 35 students' syntactic complexity and to explore whether there weresignificant differences among the four different levels of learners. Verhoeven &Apariciet al (2002) studied different languages including Dutch, English, French,Hebrew, and Spanish of written production of different ages of learners to comparethe usage of clauses in different genres. ( narration and本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。