An MD/MF Analysis Of Written Texts Produced By Chinese English Majors

With the development of corpus linguistics and learner corpus, it has been a great change on the linguistic research methods. During the last two decades, an increasing attention has been paid on the corpus-based analysis of EFL written texts both at home and abroad. MD/MF analysis uses multivariate statistical techniques to study the quantitative distribution of linguistic features across texts and text varieties, as well as to analyze linguistic co-occurrence by identifying underlying dimensions of variation via the method of statistical factor analysis. By applying a multi-feature and multi-dimensional analysis, the present study compares the stylistic differences between Chinese English major graduates’corpus and native college students’ corpus, as well as the internal variations.The untimed argumentative essays written by American university students and British university students from LOCNESS are chosen as refernce corpus. The learner corpus for this research is sub-corpus WECCL of the SWECCL, only untimed argumentative essays written by English majors in Grade3and Grade4are involved. Through the investigation, it is found that:1, The Chinese English major corpus is high in interactive and abstract dimensions, but low in informative, narrative, persuasive, and explicit dimensions. It reveals the common weakness of Chinese learners in terms of information integration and testifies to the oral style features in Chinese English major graduates’ writing.2, Compared with native speakers, Chinese English major graduates show different degrees of deviations when adopting function related language features. In their argumentative writing, Chinese English major gradates overuse private verbs, present tense verbs, pronouns, general emphatics, possibility modals, necessity modals, adverbs, and conjuncts, while underuse nouns, prepositions, past tense verbs, perfect aspect verbs, wh-relative clauses, prediction modals, and passives.3, By analyzing the internal variations of LOCNESS, WECCL and other two corpora quoted from Pan’s (2012) study:UGA and GA, it is found that with the improvement of English competency, the style consciousness of Chinese English major graduates is strengthened to some extent, but not distinct enough.Pedagogical implications are also provided according to the research findings listed above. First, more knowledge about English cultures and thinking habits need to be taught in class to help students to get rid of the interference of mother tongue mindset. Second, compositions of different styles or comparative analysis of writing from native speakers and Chinese EFL learners could be demonstrated to students to cultivate their style consciousness. Third, teachers could learn to adopt corpus-based approach to study students’ learning problems, thus proposing solutions in teaching.