Syntactic Complexity of ICNALE B2 level subcorpus

The present study aims to investigate differences in the syntactic complexity in argumentative essays produced by college-level writers with different L1 backgrounds, which are contrasted to the essays of L1 English writers as a reference, to understand how the interplay of writing topics and L1 backgrounds play out in argumentative essays. The college-level essays were taken from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (INCALE) (Ishikawa, 2009). The B2+ level in which student writers have an equivalent TOEFL score of 87 and above was adopted for data analysis. This study used 80 essays written by Korean EFL students as the EFL group, 80 essays written by Singaporean ESL students as the ESL group at the B2+ level, and 80 essays written by L1 English professionals (i.e., English instructors and teachers) as the L1 English group. The corpus data was analyzed using the L2SCA.本研究旨在考察不同母语（L1）背景的高校写作者所撰写的议论文在句法复杂度层面的差异，并以母语为英语的写作者的议论文作为参照进行对比，以此揭示写作话题与母语背景的交互作用如何在议论文写作中得以呈现。本次研究所用的高校阶段议论文语料取自《国际亚洲英语学习者语料库网络（International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English，INCALE）》（Ishikawa, 2009）。本研究选取对应托福（TOEFL）成绩87分及以上的B2+等级语料开展数据分析。本次研究共设置三组语料：80篇B2+等级的韩国英语作为外语（English as a Foreign Language, EFL）学习者撰写的议论文作为EFL组，80篇B2+等级的新加坡英语作为第二语言（English as a Second Language, ESL）学习者撰写的议论文作为ESL组，以及80篇母语为英语的专业人士（即英语讲师与教师）创作的议论文作为母语英语组。本研究采用L2SCA工具对语料数据进行分析。