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Phraseological complexity and low- and intermediate-level L2 learners’ writing quality

  • Jingyang Jiang , Peng Bi , Nana Xie and Haitao Liu EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: August 16, 2021

Abstract

This study explores the extent to which phraseological complexity measures can predict second-language (L2) writing quality of low- and intermediate-level learners, especially in comparison with the more traditional syntactic and lexical complexity measures. To measure phraseological complexity, we evaluated phraseological diversity and phraseological sophistication by focusing on two commonly-used phraseological units (adjective-noun and verb-direct-object combinations). Our findings show that phraseological, syntactic, and lexical complexity measures can respectively explain 36.0, 34.4, and 56.5% of variance in writing scores. Although lexical complexity measures are responsible for more variance in writing scores, all three complexity dimensions contribute to the predictive power of writing scores, as evinced by the combined model explaining 63.4% of variance. Most phraseological complexity measures were loaded onto individual factors by the factor analysis, suggesting that phraseological complexity is an independent dimension of L2 complexity.


Corresponding author: Haitao Liu, Department of Linguistics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, Zhejiang, P. R. China; and Centre for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, P. R. China, E-mail:

Funding source: National Social Science Foundation of China

Award Identifier / Grant number: 17AYY021

  1. Research funding: This study is supported by the National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 17AYY021).

  2. Competing interests: The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

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Received: 2019-11-05
Accepted: 2021-07-29
Published Online: 2021-08-16
Published in Print: 2023-09-26

© 2021 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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