Syntactic Complexity at the Intermediate Level in EFL Writing by Early Balanced Bilinguals

Authors

  • Melisa Grabovac Stockholm University, Sweden
  • Oleksandr Kapranov University of Bergen, Norway

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2016.3.1.gra

Keywords:

early balanced bilinguals, EFL writing skills, psycholinguistics, syntactic complexity, T-Unit.

Abstract

The present article involves an empirical psycholinguistic study aimed at examining syntactic complexity in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) by early balanced Bosnian/Swedish bilingual EFL learners. 15 early balanced bilingual Bosnian/Swedish EFL learners were recruited for the study and matched with their respective control groups of intermediate EFL learners (15 speakers of Bosnian as their first language (L1) and 15 speakers of Swedish as their L1). The experimental task involved an unprepared writing assignment in English about the most significant invention of the 20th century. The corpus of the participants’ written assignments was analysed in L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer and SPSS software programs respectively. Data analysis involved measures of syntactical complexity. It has been found that the participants’ written assignments are characterised by statistically significant number of T-units scores in comparison with the Swedish L1 monolingual controls. These findings are further presented and discussed in the article.

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Published

2016-06-30

Issue

Section

Vol 3 No 1 (2016)

How to Cite

Grabovac Melisa, & Kapranov Oleksandr. (2016). Syntactic Complexity at the Intermediate Level in EFL Writing by Early Balanced Bilinguals. East European Journal of Psycholinguistics , 3(1), 55-64. https://doi.org/10.29038/eejpl.2016.3.1.gra