Syntactic complexity has been recognized as an important construct in writing research, and for the past five decades, many syntactic complexity measures (SCMs) have been examined in numerous studies. This systematic review is the first study of its kind to synthesize 36 studies spanning from 1970 to 2019 by identifying and cataloging all SCMs…

Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians…

In this article, I present a collection of student sentences to explore what it means to, and how a writer might, inhabit a sentence. Such inhabitation is a matter of ethos, style, and composition--a matter of a writer located grammatically within a discourse. Relying on student sentences, I challenge sentence-appreciation books and websites that…

Development of child language is tremendously complex, remarkable and wondrous. In a second language acquisition context, a child can acquire his second language in either acquiring both languages at the same time or learning the second language after mastering the first one. This present research is concerned to describe the syntactical…

A review of the literature reveals that increased syntactic maturity is developmental growth properly associated with elementary and junior high school students and that measuring this maturity will not prove that an individual writer is skilled or unskilled. Improved style, unlike increased syntactic maturity, is not quantifiable growth, though…

An evaluation of the t-unit as the basic unit of analysis of second language development in written form argues that despite the t-unit's advantages, the sentence-based analysis is superior for examining syntactic complexity in at least three ways: (1) it better characterizes learner knowledge; (2) it facilitates comparison across learners and…

Examines teacher response to learner errors in composition, and proposes rules for coherent writing. (AM)

As the final report of a 2-year research project, this document covers work on the development of a model of anaphora and its implications for a theory of writing development. The report outlines results from a series of experiments that specified several functions of pronouns in prose and that tested hypotheses concerning the development of…