Abstract

Engaging with source texts through reading and writing is fundamental to successful university study, and the development of syntactic competence plays a crucial role in this process, particularly for students using English as a second language (L2). To develop this ability in first-year L2 students in an Australian university, the reading to learn (R2L) pedagogy (Rose & Martin, 2012) was adopted as the core teaching approach in a credit-bearing, blended academic literacy unit. Given that syntactic complexity is a multidimensional construct, this study used the Second Language Syntactic Complexity Analyser (L2SCA) to compare pretest and posttest writing samples and to identify which dimensions of syntactic complexity first-year L2 students developed through R2L instruction. To the best of my knowledge, this combined instructional and analytical approach has been relatively underexplored in research on R2L pedagogy and L2 syntactic development. As a result, the study finds that the students as a whole significantly improved their length of clauses. Further analyses show that both high-intermediate and low-intermediate students increased their clause length, with the gains approaching statistical significances. These findings suggest that R2L pedagogy can support the development of advanced academic writing by exposing learners to texts rich in phrasal complexity.

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