Exploring Syntactic and Lexical Complexity in Narrative Tasks

Abstract

Improved complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF) is an often-stated goal of writing instruction, but there are few clear or well-established guidelines for describing and analyzing CAF. This paper looks at various measures of CAF as well as two theories for describing how they interact: Trade-off Hypothesis and Cognition Hypothesis. A study was conducted with 3 groups—a group of 3 native English speakers; one of 7 advanced non-native English speakers, and another of 9 intermediate non-native speakers—on two separate writing tasks developed in Tavakoli and Foster (2011). Analysis of the output was done utilizing a variety of measures discussed in the paper. The study offered support, albeit weak, for Trade-off Hypothesis. Suggestions for future research and improvements to analysis are suggested.