ABSTRACT
L2 researchers and teachers are interested in understanding what kinds of language tasks are conducive to L2 learners’ production of syntactically complex structures, a question that awaits more systematic empirical investigations. This study is an attempt to address the question, by comparing the syntactic complexity of L2 written production to different rhetorical tasks varying in reasoning demands. 250 college-level Chinese EFL learners participated in the study, with approximately 60 writing on a narrative, expository, expo-argumentative, or argumentative task whose subject matter was controlled. Syntactic complexity was examined multi-dimensionally with eight global- and local-level measures. It was revealed that the argumentative task elicited the greatest syntactic complexity for seven out of the eight measures, among which indices for the two global syntactic complexity measures showed significant differences from those for all the other three rhetorical tasks. Language production on the narrative task exhibited significantly lower levels of overall clause complexity and phrasal coordination in comparison to the expository and argumentative tasks. Implications of the study for L2 teaching and assessment and for measurement of syntactic complexity are discussed.
