Effects of Topic and Source Text on the Lexical Proficiency and Syntactic Complexity of High School Students’ Writing

This study investigates the effect of topic and source text on the lexical proficiency and syntactic complexity of high school students’ writing. The participants were 140 high school students selected from eight second year classes in a regular high school. They were divided into four groups and each group received a different treatment in terms of two independent variables: topic and source text. Analysis of data focused on the lexical proficiency and on the syntactic complexity of writing. Lexical proficiency was measured by lexical diversity and word frequency and syntactic complexity was measured mean number of words per sentence, left embeddedness, and number of modifiers per noun phrase. According to the result, the effects of the variables were mostly on the lexical proficiency rather than the syntactic complexity. The result also showed that topic and source text independently affected students’ writing with no interaction effect. Based on the result, the study concludes that the effects of topic and source text are mostly on the lexical proficiency, but their effects can also be different depending on the degree of topic familiarity and linguistic difficulty of the source text that the students feel. Some pedagogical implications are drawn from the study. (199 words)