| As important building blocks of language, the use of lexical bundles directly reflects the language competence of EFL learners. In addition, academic writing ability is the best representation of EFL learners’language application ability. Nowadays, the majority of researches on the usage of lexical bundles of Chinese EFL learners focus on common college students group, while somewhat ignored is the group of the advanced EFL learners.Adopting the corpus linguistic approach, the present study investigates and analyzes the four-word lexical bundles used in Chinese English-major postgraduates’graduate theses, and make a comparison with the bundles employed by native expert writers. All four-word lexical bundles are extracted with the assist of Wordsmith Tools6.0and manual filtering procedure from Chinese English-major postgraduates thesis corpus (CEPTC) and Native speakers Journal Articles corpus (NSJAC). According to the classification of academic lexical bundles designed by Biber et al.(1999), the target bundles are classified into four major categories:noun phrase fragments, prepositional phrase fragments, verb phrase fragments and lexical bundles in other forms. Then Log-likelihood ratio and standard frequency are employed in the current study in an attempt to check whether there is a significant difference in the using of lexical bundles between two corpora. Eventually, the characteristics of lexical bundles used by Chinese advanced EFL learners are summarized.Findings from the current study manifests that:(1) the quantity of lexical bundles used by Chinese advanced EFL learners are significantly larger than that of native speakers.(2) The overall structural category distribution of lexical bundles used by Chinese EFL learners are parallel to native experts. Noun phrase and prepositional phrase bundles account for70%, which presents the obvious academic writing feature in general.(3) However, with the detailed analysis, some of bundles employed by Chinese EFL learners exhibit oral and informal tendency, such as the overuse of pronoun/noun+be (+...), verb phrase (+active verb), personal pronoun+verb and underuse of anticipatory it+verb phrase/adjective phrase.(4) Due to the limited language proficiency, students’cling on’to certain fixed phrases and expressions which they feel confident in using. Some overused lexical bundles are owing to repeated employment in one text by one writer, such as noun bundles, the result(s) of the (this); prepositional bundles, such as on the basis of; verb bundles, such as that is to say; other forms bundles, such as due to the fact.(5) Because of the negative influence of their mother tongue, Chinese EFL learners are more likely to depend on their mother tongue to translate Chinese into English directly, for instance, the substantial use of one typical type of bundle "the______of the". But they seldom use more complex modifiers like attributive clause, appositive clause and so on, such as the underuse of bundles that are parts of complex relative clauses, the extent to which, the fact that the. What’s more, with the influence of Chinese whose predicate verb exists no difference when lacking subject and verb agreement, EFL leaners also misuse some lexical bundles, such as the present study are.(6)Influenced by writing genre and topic/discipline, EFL learners tend to overuse the topic/disciple-oriented bundles, such as bundles that are manually filtered, noun phrase bundles, findings of the present, and significance of the study and preposition phrase bundles, in the learning process, and in the next chapter.(7)Influenced by traditional English teaching, Chinese advanced EFL learners have the tendency to overuse passive patterns bundles in an attempt to be more objective in their writing, like be taken into consideration and so on.Based on the using conditions and features of lexical bundles of Chinese EFL learners, suggestions for advanced EFL learners and English writing teaching are provided. |
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