Measuring Written Syntactic Patterns of Second Language Learners of German

The present study was designed to analyze by quantitative methods a corpus of writing produced by four levels of American college students and by one group of professional German writers. Analysis was undertaken to (a) determine whether or not significant quantitative differences in the use of selected syntactic structures exist between the five groups; and (b) test the validity of the Hunt method of measuring syntactic maturity when applied to the writing of second language learners and native Germans. Basically, the Hunt method measures syntactic acquisition by quantifying the rate of occurrence of sentence-embedding transformation in writing samples. The findings indicate that developmental stages in the acquisition of written German syntax did exist in this study and that these stages were most clearly definable between every other level. Hunt's method of measuring syntactic maturity was successfully applied to measuring second language acquisition. In addition, some comparisons were made between this study and other first language acquisition studies and suggestions for further research were given.