Syntactic Complexity in Academic writing: A Closer Look into Complex Noun Phrases

The genre of academic research articles is unique in its frequent use of lengthy noun phrase structures. The density of extended noun phrases could be attributed to the need to convey a large amount of information in a limited number of words. Those seeking to write academic research articles, both native and non-native alike, would need to become familiar with this characteristic feature of the genre. In fact, Biber, Gray and Poonpon (2011) have predicted that the ability to employ such extended noun phrases is linked to the writer's level of proficiency. The purpose of this study is to test this hypothesis by comparing three groups of abstracts: one group by MA-level EFL non-native writers, a second group by PhD-level EFL non-native writers, and a third by a group of published native speaker abstracts. To this end, noun phrases in our three sets of data were identified and pre-and post-modifiers were manually coded. By comparing the phrasal structures of the abstracts, the differences between the three groups are observed. The findings of this study can reveal how advanced EFL writers differ from their native speaker counterparts, and can be of great significance to EFL writing instructors, textbook writers and advanced EFL students.

کلیدواژه ها:

academic writing instruction ، noun phrase development ، phrasal complexity ، research article abstracts