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.

本项研究旨在探讨具有不同第一语言背景的大学水平作者所撰写的议论文在句法复杂性方面的差异，并将这些论文与以英语为第一语言的作者作品进行对比，以此作为参考，以理解写作主题与第一语言背景之间的相互作用如何在议论文中得到体现。本研究选取的大学水平论文来自亚洲英语学习者国际语料库网络（INCALE）(Ishikawa, 2009)。在数据分析中，采纳了B2+级别，该级别学生的托福分数相当于87分以上。本研究选取了80篇韩国英语作为外语（EFL）学习者的论文作为EFL组，80篇新加坡英语作为第二语言（ESL）学习者的论文作为B2+级别的ESL组，以及80篇以英语为第一语言的专家（即英语教师和讲师）所撰写的论文作为第一语言英语组。语料库数据通过L2SCA进行分析。