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A Quantitative Study on the Measure Index of Syntactic Complexity in Textbooks for Chinese as a Second Language

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Chinese Lexical Semantics (CLSW 2021)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13250))

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Abstract

Syntactic complexity is an important index to measure the quality of text. This study identified the quantitative measure indicators of syntactic complexity from the three dimensions of aggregate, length, and relative indexes, and examined the feasibility of these indexes as syntactic complexity measure indicators. The results showed that the aggregate index of the text shows statistical differences; as the basic index to describe syntactic complexity, the aggregate index can be used to assess the suitability of textbook compilation and learners’ language output level. Moreover, in the length indexes, only the length of the T-unit and of clauses showed good differences and growth trends in the primary stage. Lastly, in the relative indexes, the number of clauses in the T-unit can be used to examine the syntactic complexity of each grade. The above results contributed to the Chinese as a Second Language teaching or in the compilation of teaching materials.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The upper and lower limits of the average value are 95% confidence intervals.

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Acknowledgments

The work was supported by the Project of Humanities and Social Sciences of the Ministry of Education: “Research on Graded Reading Standards of Business Chinese for Second Language Teaching” (18YJA740050); Key Project of International Chinese Education Research Topic of Center for Language Education and Cooperation: The Construction of the Evaluation Criterion System of Reading Attainment of International Chinese Education (20YH12B). The authors also gratefully acknowledge the helpful comments and suggestions of the viewers, which have improved the presentation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Chinese Studies, Beijing Language and Culture University, Beijing, China

    Caihong Cao & Fang Tian

  2. School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

    Wenting Cao

Authors
  1. Caihong Cao
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  2. Wenting Cao
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  3. Fang Tian
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Caihong Cao .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore, Singapore

    Minghui Dong

  2. Nanjing Normal University, Nanjing, China

    Yanhui Gu

  3. National Taiwan Normal University, Taipei, Taiwan

    Jia-Fei Hong

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Cao, C., Cao, W., Tian, F. (2022). A Quantitative Study on the Measure Index of Syntactic Complexity in Textbooks for Chinese as a Second Language. In: Dong, M., Gu, Y., Hong, JF. (eds) Chinese Lexical Semantics. CLSW 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13250. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_19

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06547-7_19

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06546-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06547-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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