The Effects of Complex Syntactic Structure and Task Type on EFL Learners' Syntactic Complexity

This study investigates the effects of complex syntactic structure(clause type and non-finite verb type) and task type(sentence connection and error correction) on EFL learners' syntactic complexity.Repeated measures analysis of variance shows that both task type and clause type have main effects on EFL learners' syntactic complexity and there is an interaction effect between task type and clause type.The interaction effect analysis indicates that there is no significant difference between adverbial clause and nominal clause in sentence connection,but as to error correction,significant difference is found between them;non-finite verb type and task type produce main effects on their syntactic complexity and there is an interaction effect between them.The other interaction effect analysis shows that EFL learners' infinitive is markedly better than participle in sentence connection,while they show no significant differences in error connection;there is no significant difference between participle and gerund,whereas they have significant difference in error correction.