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tegories: 1) examining syntactic complexity toshow the effect of pedagogical treatment in written language usage; 2) investigating thedifference on syntactic complexity between students from different grades or at differentproficiency levels; 3) using syntactic complexity as an important index for assessing thequality of students' essays; 4) analyzing whether students’ writing quality would improve astime goes on; 5) finding the shortcomings existing in grammatical complexity as a guidancefor future teaching.Previous studies have fertilized the knowledge necessary for assessing the writingcompetence of L2 learners in terms of three perspectives; fluency, accuracy and complexity.However, it still needs to make deeper study into the field of L2 learners' languageperformance based on syntactic complexity measurement for the following reasons:First, growing attention had been paid to L2 writing, but such studies on investigatingsyntactic features on a developmental in Chinese context are relatively few (Qin Xiaoqing，2007; Bao Gui, 2009). Yao Lan (2005) reviewed earlier studies concerning EFL writing inChina，and she found that non empirical studies occupy a large proportion.Second, it is necessary to improve and strengthen students" ability to use more varied andcomplex structure. When entering college, the students have grasped English grammaticalstructures. Instead of accumulating new grammatical structures, they have to improve theability of using more sophisticated language structures, and of efficiently using morestructures in a simple sentence (Qin Xiaoqing & Wen Qiufang, 2007:12).Third，the language development does not always show a linear way, it is of greatimportance to find the changing pattern，in order to give proper instruction in learning.Generally, it was supposed that the development of adults’ second language proficiencyfollows a ladder-like model (Fisher & Stewart, 2003), which defines adult cognitivedevelopment as a static progressive process unfolding along a series of fixed ladder steps，either through stages or though linear scales. But there are many scholars who feel that,while second language acquisition by adults does not parallel other developmental processesas in the case of first language acquisition, the development of syntactic maturity in a secondlanguage nonetheless proceeds much along the same lines as in first language acquisitionThen，they quoted a omega "Q" symbol to illustrate the developmental tendency ofsyntactic complexity, which means it develop non-linearly, with a steady increase as learnersapproach a particular stage，followed by a decline as they level it.Based on the above discussion, this study is mean to enrich previous achievements onsyntactic complexity. It will present a picture of developmental features of 21 complexitymeasures commonly used in L2 development researches by analyzing relatively large scaleESL writing materials produced by English majors collected from the Written and SpokenEnglish Corpus of Chinese Learners (Wen et al., 2005). And more specifically, this studywill also make a comparison between essays produced by Chinese students and Englishnative speakers. The essays written by native speakers will serve as a yardstick, showing towhat extent the gap exists between Chinese students and English native speakers.Furthermore, taking a developmental perspective, this research design can provide ESLwriting teachers and researchers with reliable and consistent