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.