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A Corpus-based Study Of The Nativelikeness Of The Spoken Discourse Of Chinese EFL Learners: A Case Study Of Modal Verbs

Posted on:2009-05-28Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:S Y ZhuFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360245495268Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
China has made a great achievement in foreign language teaching and reforms; however, in order to further deepen the reform in teaching foreign languages the foreign language teachers and educators should undoubtedly focus on the weak points of foreign language learners and English learners in particular in their studying the foreign language. English can but be learned as a foreign language in China(except Hong Kong, the special administrative region), as there is basically no macro-environment where EFL (in comparison with Chinese languages including those of the minorities ) can be naturally acquired, not to mention the environment where English can be naturally acquired as a native language. Therefore, Chinese EFL learners necessarily have their own unique features in learning English in many aspects. At present it is widely realized in the foreign language circle that the English learners of China have their severe deficiency in listening and in speaking especially, and "deaf-and-dumb English", vivid but overstated, was once widely spread. The deficiency greatly hinders the successful communication and becomes the choke point for the foreign language study to break through. The dissertation aims to make a survey of the results of teaching the speaking of foreign languages which can demonstrate the achievements and inadequacy, to make clear the degrees of the nativelikeness of Chinese EFL learners in their using modal verbs and subjunctive mood and to point out the direction in which the spoken English teaching of China should struggle from a certain aspect by analyzing the spoken English data of the Chinese students, the spoken English data from The International Corpus of English and the spoken data of native speakers of English through CA or CIA and then by the comparatively systematic quantitative and qualitative analysis of the related aspects such as the use of the modal verbs and each type of subjunctive mood. The related corpora in this dissertation include the spoken part of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners, the branch corpora as L2 corpora (involving the branch corpora of Hong Kong, India, Philippine, Singapore, and East Africa) from The International Corpus of English (ICE) and the native corpora such as Scottish Corpus, The British National Corpus (BNC) and Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The soft wares used as tools are WordSmith Tools 5. 0 and NOOJ 2. 0 used to process the spoken data, EXEL used to process the digits and SPSS used as an analytical and statistical tool. The major original points in the dissertation are: In china, it is the first time to adopt the three categories of spoken data to carry out the CA or CIA and confirm the degree of nativelikeness of the English Learners of China in one perspective; the first time to try to make a systematic survey of the modal verbs will, shall, would and should in a unique way together with tense and the subjunctive mood. The main findings in the study are: there is apparent nativelikeness in all the respects being studied concerning the four modals; Chinese EFL speakers tend to greatly underuse the related chunks of will, would, shall and should; Chinese EFL speakers show a tendency of written English in general; Chinese EFL speakers are significantly different from native speakers in their using affirmative forms, contracted forms, and the tense of past future with would and should; Chinese EFL speakers tend to use should more like a content word with a single meaning rather than as a functional one with more than one meaning; they underuse be going to structure; and they underuse the structures expressing subjunctive mood with if and reveal their Chinese thinking mode with most of the if-clauses located before the main clauses.
Keywords/Search Tags:spoken corpora, nativelikeness, modal auxiliaries, L1 transfer, CIA
PDF Full Text Request
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