A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Four-word Lexical Bundles In English Writing By Chinese EFLs

Recently, with the development of corpus linguistics, scholars find that there are many pre-fabricated phrases (lexical bundles) in language performance. Lexical bundles, especially four-word lexical bundles are a kind of common phenomenon in actual communication. Their forms are fixed or half-fixed. They combine grammar, meaning and context. They appear commonly in people's daily utterances. However, they are used in a sub-conscious way and so have not been very well systematically analyzed. Lexical bundles approach will have great feasibility and have various kinds of advantages that other teaching approaches cannot have.Corresponding to the three developmental stages, the learner corpora employed in the study are SH(Senior High School Students), NM(Non-English Major Students) and EM(English Major Students) corpora. They are reconstructed from the parent corpora of the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), the Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) and two self-built corpora of Tianjin Senior High School and Tianjin Normal University. On the basis of a corpus-driven approach, the study focuses on the four-word lexical bundles in the three learner corpora, by referring to native speaker corpora, LOCNESS and BNC World, and then comparing the similarities and differences on the usage of four-word lexical bundles between Chinese learners and native speakers structurally and functionally, which is expected to reveal the features of Chinese learner usage of four-word lexical bundles.The study shows that, Chinese English learners tend to use more four-word lexical bundles than native speakers do in a large extent, but most of them are topic-related, while native speakers use more functional bundles. It also reveals that structurally Chinese learners use more "verb phrase with active verbs" and "noun plus verb pattern", while native speakers use more "noun plus preposition pattern". Thirdly, the functional analysis yields that Chinese learners use a special type of stance bundle, "third personal plural", while native speakers use impersonal stance bundles instead. Finally, some pedagogical implications, as well as suggested future research, are discussed.