An Investigation of Native and Nonnative English Speakers’ Levels of Written Syntactic Complexity in Asynchronous Online Discussions

This manuscript reports on a corpus-based comparison of native and nonnative graduate students’ language production in an asynchronous learning environment. Using 486 discussion board postings from a five-year period (2009–2013), we analyzed the extent to which native and nonnative university students’ writing differed in 10 measures of syntactic complexity targeting the length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination,...