A Study of Syntactic Complexity in Children’s Storybooks with a Call for More Attention to Clausal Subordination

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

This research aims to assess the syntactic complexity in children’s storybooks often used in elementary English classrooms and to investigate with what syntactic features English language learners would face difficulty as they read storybooks. Guiding this study three research questions are established as follows: (a) What is the nature of sentence length in children’s storybooks measured by T-unit and dependent clause unit?; (b) What is the nature of clausal density in children’s storybooks measured by clauses per T-unit?; and (c) Which kind of dependent clause is most frequently appeared in children’s storybooks? To answer these research questions 30 children’s storybooks of three reading levels were randomly selected for further analysis. For the measure of sentence length, total number of T-units, mean length of T-unit, and mean length of dependent clause-unit were calculated. For the measure of clausal density which reflects the extent of clausal subordination, the number of clauses per T-units was counted. Percentages of T-units containing three main types of dependent clauses were calculated to explore which kind of dependent clauses is most occupied in children’s storybooks. As for the critical findings of the study, on average, 20 to 40 percent of T-units in a storybook contain one or more dependent clauses. In all of the storybooks, nominal clauses were appeared most frequently, and in more difficult storybooks, adverbial and nominal clauses tend to be contained much more than relative clauses. When selecting storybooks, it is imperative to look into the extent of clausal subordination, because dependent clause is the syntactic area with which elementary students would feel unfamiliar and difficult.

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