205 / 2018-04-09 16:07:27

Exploratory and Confirmatory Factor Analyses of L2 Linguistic Complexity Measures

Syntactic complexity measures; Lexical complexity measures; Exploratory factor analysis; Confirmatory factor analysis

全体主题 > Standards in developing language assessments

Over the years, a wealth of complexity measures has been proposed in L2 research (Bulté & Housen, 2012) and used as assessment tools in measuring the quality of L2 learner’s written products (Taguchi, Crawford, & Wetzel, 2013; Bulté & Housen, 2014; Yang, Lu, & Weigle, 2015). However, it remains unclear the factor structure underlying these measures and such lack of understanding poses threat to the validity of assessments utilizing these measures. To address this research gap, this study investigates the factor structure of a selection of L2 syntactic and lexical complexity measures. A total of 930 Chinese college EFL learners each completed one of two argumentative writing tasks. The data were randomly split into two samples (n = 465; n = 465). Based on relevant literature, 11 indices measuring clausal subordination, phrasal elaboration, overall syntactic complexity, and lexical complexity were chosen to measure the linguistic complexity of the sample collected. The structure of these measures was examined using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). EFA was used on sample 1 to identify the clusters of items, and the results support a three-factor structure measuring clausal subordination, phrasal elaboration and lexical complexity. CFA was then utilized on sample 2 and the results were largely consistent with the findings of EFA. With regard to the relationships among the sub-constructs identified, it was found that lexical complexity had a moderate positive correlation with phrasal elaboration, while these two sub-constructs both correlated negatively with clausal subordination. The findings provide empirical evidence for the multidimensionality of L2 linguistic complexity.