scholarly journals Syntactic complexity development in college students’ essay writing based on AWE

Author(s):  
Wenjin Li ◽  
Zhihong Lu ◽  
Qianwen Liu

Syntactic complexity is considered to be an important device for assessing the quality of writing in a second language (L2), as it indicates the diversity and complexity of production units or grammatical structures. This paper studies the development of Chinese college students’ syntactic complexity in essay writing by using an Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) tool, the Pigai system (www.pigai.org, which has been most widely used in China in the last ten years). The data analysis showed that the students’ syntactic competences in their final drafts outperformed that in their first drafts in three aspects: length of production unit, amount of subordination, and amount of coordination.

2005 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 227-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen D. Edwards ◽  
Art W. Bangert ◽  
Gregory Cooch ◽  
Naotaka Shinfuku ◽  
Tao Chen ◽  
...  

The World Health Organization Quality of Life-100 (WHOQOL-100, Power, Harper, Bullinger, & WHO1QLG), the Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (Zhang, 1993), and the Self-Rating Depression Scale (Zhang, 1993) were used to determine whether Chinese college students from only child and sibling child families rated perceptions of their quality of life differently. Small to moderate significant differences were found when comparing only students to sibling students on the WHOQOL-100 with no significant differences on measures of anxiety and depression. These results suggest that only students do not differ greatly from sibling students in terms of their overall perceptions of their quality of life. A unique characteristic of this study was that it targeted older college students born after implementation of the one-child-per-family policy in China. Also, self-rating instruments were used to gain a greater holistic understanding of the emotional well-being, physical state and social functioning of students. Several psychosocial and economic reasons, including methodological issues related to this study's findings, were discussed.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-108 ◽  
Author(s):  
Weiwei Yang ◽  
YouJin Kim

AbstractThe purpose of the current study is to examine the role of topic familiarity in the complexity, accuracy, and fluency of second language (L2) writing. Topic familiarity was operationalized as whether writers are writing about a common, everyday subject matter in relation to themselves (+ familiar) or to a group they are not familiar with (–familiar), and a learner survey was used to test the validity of the construct. A total of 123 Chinese EFL college students participated in the study, with 61 writing on a familiar topic and 62 writing on a less familiar topic. Their writing performance was analyzed for lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, accuracy, and fluency. Data analyses revealed that the students produced essays with significantly lower lexical complexity for the less familiar topic than for the familiar topic, while the performance areas of accuracy, fluency, and syntactic complexity were not affected by the degree of familiarity. The study findings are discussed in terms of their implications for task selection and sequencing for L2 teaching and assessment purposes.


2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 44-73
Author(s):  
Xiaohao Ding ◽  
Wei Ha ◽  
Le Kang ◽  
W. John Morgan

Purpose —The oversupply of college graduates and increasing competition in the Chinese urban labor market have forced college students to undertake internships much earlier and to a greater intensity in the hope of boosting their employment prospects. It may be argued that the considerable time and energy thus spent on internships is deleterious to their university studies. The paper considers the factors that determine the intensity of an internship experience. Design/Approach/Methods —Building on a Cobb-Douglas utility function, the paper constructs a Prisoners’ Dilemma game to model the internship behavior of Chinese college students, and then examines the determinants of internship using data from a 2011 survey of approximately 10,000 Chinese college students from 47 higher education institutions in the Beijing metropolitan area and multivariate regression analysis. Findings —Empirical results confirm three key hypotheses derived from our model: first, students’ perceptions of higher differentials across available jobs in the labor market entice them to intern excessively; second, the improving quality of college teaching and the consequent benefit for knowledge acquisition mitigates the need for excessive internship; third, student preferences for fundamental knowledge acquisition also tilts the balance towards more study and less internship. Originality/Value —These findings suggest that in the context of a tight graduate labor market, improving the quality of college teaching provides a viable alternative to excessive internship by students.


2009 ◽  
Vol 105 (1) ◽  
pp. 267-274
Author(s):  
Jie Zhang ◽  
Dwight A. Hennessy ◽  
Jing Luo ◽  
Yaping Song ◽  
Kailin Ren ◽  
...  

This study assessed the extent to which social sexism affects Chinese women's perception and evaluation of other women's performance. A sample of 100 college women was selected in a top university in Beijing, China, and was asked to read six scholastic essays and then evaluate the quality of the essays and competence of the authors. Male and female names were randomly assigned as authors of the essays, and the respondents were blind to the arrangement. Results showed that the essays assumed to be written by male authors did not receive higher scores than those assumed to be written by female authors on quality or competence items. Sexism is not marked among these highly educated young women.


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