A Corpus-based Study Of Chinese Learners’ Use Of Reformulation Markers In Written English

Recently, in the field of Discourse Analysis, cohesion and coherence haveattracted many professors’ and scholars’ attention, and what they focus on is how toconstruct a meaning-coherent discourse by using cohesive devices. As one of thecohesive devices, discourse markers have also been paid much attention to, and manypapers, journal articles and works have been published in this field. However, there areseveral studies on reformulation markers, the subordinate class of discourse markers.Due to the importance of reformulation markers in the process of communication, thisthesis will focus on the use of reformulation markers in written English by ChineseEFL learners from the perspective of Second Language Acquisition.Based on Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis and error analysis, MICUSP(Michigan Corpus of Upper-level Student Papers) is put as a reference to study the useof reformulation markers by Chinese college students in WECCL (Written EnglishCorpus of Chinese Learners) from the following questions:1. What are the lexical properties of reformulation markers used by Chinese EFLlearners compared with native learners?2. What are the syntactic properties of reformulation markers used by ChineseEFL learners compared with native learners?3. What are the semantic properties of reformulation markers used by ChineseEFL learners compared with native learners?4. What are the reasons for these properties in WECCL? And what are thepedagogical implications?Some general conclusions are drawn after analysis:1. Generally speaking, Chinese EFL learners use reformulation markers morefrequently in their compositions than English natives. After classified reformulationmarkers according to Del Saz’s classification, it can be seen that the mostly usedreformulation markers in both corpora are expression reformulation markers; inaddition, the use of compression reformulation markers by Chinese EFL learners alsomake up a certain proportion, but not in MICUSP.2. Based on syntactic analysis, it is found that most of the reformulation markersare put in the initial position by both Chinese EFL learners and English natives;however, as for such as, I mean, i.e., or rather and namely, English natives tend to putthem in the medial position, while Chinese EFL learners prefer to put them in different positions of sentences, and there also exist many misuses.3. Semantically, some reformulation markers in MICUSP and WECCL are used toshow almost the same relationship, but Chinese EFL learners make a large amount ofmistakes on the use of reformulation markers.4. There are four reasons for the properties of the reformulation markers used inWECCL: usage differences of reformulation markers of the same type, languagetransfer, expressing ability and avoidance and personal preference. Then somesuggestions for English teaching are put forward to make some improvements: Firstly,attentions should be paid on raising learners’ awareness of cultural differences.Secondly, emphasis should be put on the different usage of reformulation markers.