Syntactic complexity in L2 learners’ argumentative writing: Developmental stages and the within-genre topic effect

The developmental patterns that learners follow as their language develops in syntactic complexity has gained much attention in L2 writing research recently. This study aims to contribute to the growing body of empirical literature testing the hypothesis that learners move through a set of stages in their use of complex structures for L1 Turkish learners of L2 English (Biber et al., 2011). It also aims to contribute to the limited literature on the within-genre topic effect on syntactic complexity. Complexity developmental stages of 90 intermediate level L1 Turkish learners were examined in their argumentative essays on three different topics (cell phones, online learning, and death penalty). Our findings showed that learners were developmentally in Stage 2 and Stage 3, with frequent use of finite adverbial clauses, attribute adjectives embedded in the noun phrase, and prepositional phrases as adverbials within the clause, which is in line with their proficiency level. Thus, our findings conform to the hypothesized stages of complexity development. Our findings also illustrated a significant effect of the death penalty topic on learners' complexity developmental stages, which is probably due to its greater cognitive demands as a more impersonal topic than the others.