Assessing Grammatical Complexity

Assistant Professor
Social Sciences University of Ankara

Syntactic complexity is commonly measured through production-based tasks (e.g., essay writing). However, it is not always possible to gather information about learners' linguistic knowledge from production data (Gass, 2001). Responding to the call for exploring alternative understandings of syntactic complexity in L2 writing research (Ortega, 2015), this study explores if a judgment test could elicit data about learners' knowledge of syntactic complexity. It specifically investigates L2 learners' (n = 43) performance on a complexity judgment test (CJT) developed based on the developmental stages for complexity features hypothesized by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011), and their complexity judgment criteria. Data were collected through a CJT and stimulated recalls and were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. Results revealed that at the production level, learners were able to produce more clause-level complexity features, but at the input level, they were able to judge the complexity of phrases more accurately than the complexity of clauses, confirming that information from a judgment test can reflect learners' linguistic knowledge which cannot be observed from produced language. Results also revealed that extracomplexity factors (e.g., grammar, vocabulary, length, L1) were involved in learners' complexity judgments as indicated by the evidence from the stimulated recall data.
 
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