The writing of Spanish majors: A longitudinal analysis of syntactic complexity

Measures of syntactic complexity are often employed as a way to objectively characterize the development of second language (L2) writing. Complexity measures are eclectic and may be based on length of syntactic unit, relationships between clauses, and variety of syntactic structures. Development in written complexity is of particular interest to university foreign language (FL) departments given its connection to academic discourse. However, few...