How do Polish first-year students write? A corpus study of syntactic complexity in Danish as a foreign language

Abstract

Linguistic complexity is considered a good indicator of language learners’ performance and development. In the last few decades, linguistic, and especially syntactic, complexity has become a popular and important field of research within second and foreign language acquisition studies, and various complexity indices have been operationalized in research as a yardstick for the syntax and vocabulary of L2 texts. In this article, I examine the syntactic complexity of texts written in Danish by young Poles. The analyzed material consists of exam papers written by Polish students of Danish philology after the first year of study, and they come from different learner groups over the last 20 years. There is some variation across the learner groups in terms of both learnerand task-related variables, and I apply a number of complexity indices to examine the traces of these variables in the syntax of the analyzed texts. I focus on differences across learner groups, text genres and the authors’ gender.