A Syntactic Complexity Analysis of Revised Composition through Artificial Intelligence-based Question-answering Systems
Chen Wang · 2023
With the rapid development of AI technology, it has been increasingly applied in educational practice. The ChatGPT system, released on November 30, 2022, can provide personalized feedback for learners' learning needs in the education field, such as revising students' writing. This paper focuses on the syntactic complexity of college English argumentative essay writing. The researcher compared the English writing of the students' TEM-4 test with the essays that have been revised by ChatGPT. The results show significant differences between the revised and the students' original essays in terms of language production length, overall sentence complexity, number of coordinating structures, number of dependent structures, and phrase complexity. The writing revised by ChatGPT better match the characteristics of high-level argumentative writing, which can be used as a powerful support for students' essay writing practice. Hopefully, this study can provide a reference for college English writing teaching. The study's conditions were set as unlimited online editing of argumentative essays, and L2 syntactic complexity is influenced by the writing environment and genre, so the effects may not generalize to other conditions.