A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Causative Constructions In Chinese College Students’ English Writing

The study on second language writing has always been an important part in thestudy of second language acquisition. And since vocabulary is the most basiccomponent of writing, domestic and foreign scholars have done a lot of research onlearners’ use of vocabulary in second language writing. Currently, the level of Chinesecollege students’ English writing is relatively low. Even English major students oftencannot use English words, especially verbs, flexibly and idiomatically. Some scholarsstudy the use of English causative constructions of Chinese students in their Englishwriting, and the results show that Chinese English learners do not have a goodcommand of English causative constructions.This thesis undertakes a research on the use of causative constructions in ChineseEnglish majors’ compositions on the basis of corpora. The author adopts thesub-corpora of CLEC (Chinese Learners’ English Corpus) and the corpus ofLOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) as the reference. All thecausative verbs are picked out in the Lexicon for English Majors and classified intotwo categories. The two categories of causative constructions are then searched in thetwo corpora respectively. By comparative analysis of the causative constructions inthe two corpora, Chinese English learners’ use of causative constructions and theirdifference with native speakers can be fully illustrated.The results show that English major students don’t fully master the causativeconstructions, especially the lexical causatives. They use few lexical causatives andoveruse analytical causative constructions, especially the structure “make+object+complement”, which is much more frequently used than other causative constructions.They use analytical causatives even when lexical causatives can be used to expressthe same meaning. The results show that there are many differences in the use ofcausative constructions between Chinese English learners and native speakers.English learners cannot use causative constructions idiomatically. The possiblereasons for the inappropriate use of causative constructions may be language transfer, improper second language learning strategy and insufficient input. Based on the abovereasons, the author put forward some suggestions for English teaching so as toimprove students’ use of the English language. So this study has some pedagogicalsignificance.