Expressive Writing in a Saudi university EFL classroom: Evaluating gains in syntactic complexity

This study determines if the EFL Saudi students achieve greater syntactic complexity when they engage in expressive writing than when they write about a general topic. This study employs an ex post facto research design to compare the writing output of EFL learners. Study sample comprises 24 college students enrolled in an English writing course, and their writing was analyzed using the computer software named <em>Web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer.</em> The hypothesis of this study proposes that the emotionality of the writing topics positively affect the writers’ productions by increasing the syntactic complexity in L2 writing overall. It can be hypothesized that, 'Saudi EFL learners achieve better syntactic complexity on emotional subject that other general subject'. Consequently, the current study attempted to answer the following research question: Do EFL Saudi students achieve better syntactic complexity when they engage in expressive writing (write about an emotional subject) than when they write about a general topic? The study found that students achieved higher scores in the emotional essays than they achieved in general topic, however, the differences were significant in only four elements out of five. Students' expressive writings were more developed than their writings on general topics with reference to length of production unit, amount of coordination, and phrase complexity.