Accordingly, there is a pressing need to address writing problems displayed in writing skills among Chinese EFL learners in TOEFL-like high-stakes tests. This poses no optimistic prospect to their endeavors in pursuing further studies overseas as most programs, especially graduate programs in the United States, require a considerably higher level of English proficiency. Although there has been improvement in TOEFL holistic score from 77 points in 2010 to 81 points in 2019 (on a total score of 120), the average score of writing is 20 points (on a score scale of 30), a score which falls within the range of High- Intermediate level (17–23) and remains unchanged over the past 10 years (with the only exception in 2010, reaching 21 points) 1. However, despite best efforts, Chinese test-takers still display poor performance in TOEFL Writing Section as evidenced by the Test and Score Data Summary for TOEFL iBT ® Test (2010–2019). One manifestation lies in the increasing number of students who are registering for and taking international standardized tests like TOEFL and IELTS as proof of their language qualifications and as their first step to embark on adventures in education overseas. The global spread of English in academic contexts has led to its pervasive power over EFL/ESL education around the world. Therefore, among the errors committed by language learners, the presence or absence of linguistic complexity deserves closer observation, as understanding the extent to which learners make use of linguistic elements in written contexts will offer a holistic and accurate picture with respect to the linguistic repertoire that is desired for a proficient writer in academic settings. In addition, a good command of linguistic features can facilitate L2 learners to enhance writing skills, such as planning, drafting, and revising ( Sasaki, 2000 Cumming, 2001). Meanwhile, studies have shown that it is more difficult to write linguistically complex sentences than linguistically simple ones (e.g., Wolfe-Quintero et al., 1998 Bastiaanse et al., 2009). Among the indicators of writing quality, the presence of linguistic complexity has received extensive attention among L2 researchers and practitioners, since indices of complexity have been considered of vital importance in evaluating language production and can be used “to gauge proficiency, to describe performance, and to benchmark development” ( Ortega, 2012, p.128). In the meantime, strong within-proficiency topic effects were found on the majority of measures in the syntactic, lexical, and morphological dimensions.Īs one of the two productive skills (the other is speaking), writing constitutes an essential part of education. The results from the correlation analysis, multiple linear regression, and independent sample t-tests indicated that there was not a linear correlation between the majority of linguistic complexity and human-rated score levels and that proficiency among Chinese EFL learners did not signal a discriminative power in their language production. To this end, a total of 1,002 writing samples were collected from a TOEFL11 corpus, and six automated-coding instruments were used to investigate the variations of complexity among Chinese English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. In addition, we also tend to tap into within-genre topic effects on the production of complexity measures by learners. Using a large-scale learner corpus collected from a TOEFL (internet-based test (iBT), this study aims to explore the extent to which the three dimensions of linguistic complexity, syntactic, lexical, and morphological complexity, are associated with human scoring in high-stakes tests. However, there are relatively scant studies focusing on the diversity and structural elaboration of complexity in L2 production data that are extracted from high-stakes tests.

In studies on second language writing, linguistic complexity exhibited by learners has long been regarded as being indicative of writing proficiency. School of Foreign Studies, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China.

Namely synonym