The Effect of Online Writing on the Syntactic Complexity of EFL Learners’ English Compositions

This paper explores the effect of online writing on the syntactic complexity of EFL learners' English writing among graduate students. We sampled the initial and final version of 55 English argumentative essays written by Chinese university students on an online writing platform. These essays were analyzed using 14 syntactic complexity measures with the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer (Lu, 2010). Results show that there are significant differences in the use of syntactic structures between the two versions, while there is no significant differences in the 14 measures of syntactic complexity between the initial and final version. The implications of the results for L2 writing teaching and for automatic scoring system are also discussed.