İngilizce Öğrencilerinin Tartışmacı Metinlerindeki Söz Dizimsel ve Sözcüksel Karmaşıklık: Düzeye Göre Fark

Bu çalışmada, İngilizce öğrencilerinin tartışmacı metinlerindeki sözdizimsel ve sözcüksel karmaşıklığın öğrenci düzeylerine göre nasıl farklılık gösterdiği incelenmektedir. Sözdizimsel karmaşıklığı cümle, tümce ve öbek düzeylerinde inceleyerek, sözcüksel karmaşıklığı da çeşitlilik, yoğunluk ve karmaşıklık boyutları ile ele alarak, her iki karmaşıklık türüne de çok boyutlu bir perspektiften yaklaşılmaktadır. Çalışmanın katılımcılarını Türkiye'deki bir üniversitenin İngilizce Öğretmenliği programında öğrenim gören, Avrupa Dilleri Ortak Çerçeve Programına göre B2 ve C1 düzeylerinden olan toplam 42 lisans öğrencisi oluşturmaktadır. Katılımcılar bu çalışmaya gönüllü olarak katılmış ve çalışma kapsamında tartışmacı kompozisyon yazmışlardır. Söz dizimsel karmaşıklık yapıları manuel olarak kodlanırken, sözcüksel karmaşıklıkları Lu (2012) tarafından geliştirilen otomatik program ile kodlanmıştır. Her iki grup için tanımlayıcı istatistikler ayrı ayrı hesaplanmış ve iki grup arasındaki farkı görmek için Mann-Whitney U testi kullanılmıştır. Sonuçlar iki düzey arasında üç sözdizimsel yapıda istatistiksel olarak önemli farklılıklar gösterirken, sözcük karmaşıklığında gruplar arasında anlamlı bir fark bulunmamıştır. Çalışmanın sonuçları dilbilimsel özellikler ile ikinci dil yazma düzeyi arasındaki bağlantının anlaşılmasına katkıda bulunmaktadır.

Syntactic Complexity and Lexical Complexity in Argumentative Writing: Variation by Proficiency

This study explores how syntactic complexity and lexical complexity vary in argumentative essays written by L2 learners of English at B2 and C1 CEFR proficiency levels. We approach both syntactic complexity and lexical complexity from a multi-dimensional perspective, examining syntactic complexity at different levels (i.e., global, clausal, and phrasal) and including the three lexical dimensions as diversity, density, and sophistication. Undergraduate students (n=42) studying English Language Teaching at a private university in Turkey voluntarily participated in this study and completed an argumentative essay writing task. We manually coded their essays for syntactic complexity structures and used the automated analyzer developed by Lu (2012) for lexical complexity features. We calculated descriptive statistics separately for the lower-level and higher-level groups and investigated the syntactic complexity variation among the two groups using the nonparametric Mann-Whitney U test. Our results indicated significant variation among the two proficiency levels in three syntactic structures (finite complement clauses controlled by nouns, words before the main verb, and passives), while there was no significant difference between the groups in lexical complexity. These findings contribute to the understanding of the connection between linguistic features and L2 writing proficiency levels.

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