COMPARING SYNTACTIC COMPLEXITY OF MASTER THESIS TO DOCTORAL DISSERTATION: CORPUS-BASED STUDY
Abstract
Syntactic complexity is an essential indicator of English Foreign Language (EFL) students' writing quality. Many previous studies analyzed and compared syntactic complexity in published research articles through large-grained measures. However, the study of syntactic complexity unpublished research through fine-grained measures gained less attention. Thus, this study tried to fill the gap. This study aimed to analyze and compare the syntactic complexity measures of master thesis and doctoral dissertations written by Indonesian students through fine-grained measures. This study conducted a quantitative design of a corpus-based method. The corpus data consists of 126 abstracts of master theses and doctoral dissertations from English Language Education of Universitas Negeri Malang. The twelve phrasal syntactic complexity measures were employed by using Tool for the Automatic Analysis of Syntactic Sophistication and Complexity (TAASSC) to analyze the data. The outcomes showed that doctoral students employed more complex phrasal complexity measures than master thesis. This study also revealed significant differences between master thesis and doctoral dissertation in 9 out of 12 phrasal complexity measures. In conclusion, the higher degree of education the more phrasal syntactic complexity features was employed in their academic writing. The significant difference in phrasal complexity also reflects the significant difference in writing quality written by master and doctoral students.
Keywords
References
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.25134/erjee.v12i2.9528
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