Lexicogrammar of the L2 English Essays Written by Asian College Students: A Corpus-Based Study

By combining a contrastive interlanguage analysis (Granger, 1996(Granger, , 2015) ) and a multidimensional analysis (Biber, 1988), this study compared the essays written by Asian college students (in China, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Thailand) and L1 English native speakers (ENS).These essays were taken from the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE; Ishikawa, 2023a).Through four analyses based on dimension scores, key lexicogrammatical features, clustering, and classification, this study revealed that Asian learners tended to write less informational, less narrative, less overtly expressive, less abstract, and less time-constraint types of essays than ENS.It was also suggested that the lexicogrammatical features of essays were influenced more strongly by learners' L2 proficiency levels than their countries/regions and that learner essays were classified into four archetypes: colloquial and personal, interactive and persuasive, static and descriptive, and dynamic and reflective.These findings will shed new light on our understanding of Asian learners' L2 English use.