In this study, we investigated the relationships between overall, clausal (coordination and subordination), and subclausal grammatical complexity in essays written by 54 adult Japanese EFL learners, with special reference to the developmental trajectories, from coordination through subordination to phrasal elaboration, that are identified in the literature. We also clarified whether using the cloze test with the fixed ratio deletion method and the exact-word scoring method to measure learners' proficiency could capture such trajectories. The results indicated that, while the cloze test did not correlate with any indices of grammatical complexity, overall complexity measures had positive correlations with subordination and phrasal elaboration indices, while subordination and phrasal elaboration had negative correlations. This suggests that, as a whole, the learners in this study were in transition to the later, advanced stage of the trajectories. Further analyses, employing general, but fine-grained, measures of phrasal complexity, revealed that the cloze test significantly correlated with these fine-grained measures, which indicates that the cloze test could capture learner variability within a particular developmental stage.
中村 et al. (Sun,) studied this question.