A Corpus-based Study On The Features Of Degree Adverbs By Chinese EFL Learners In Their Spoken English

Degree adverbs are frequently used in communication to express a speaker’s tone andattitude accurately and can influence the realization of the interpersonal functions of language.Degree adverbs are easy to understand, but it’s difficult for Chinese EFL students to have agood command of degree adverbs in communication especially in oral production as Englishnative speakers do.By Contrastive Analysis, the present study has an investigation on the usage of degreeadverbs in oral production based on the Spoken and Written English Corpus of ChineseLearners (SWECCL) and British National Corpus (BNC). First of all, the frequencies ofdegree adverbs in the two corpora are searched through software AntConc to makecomparisons of normalized frequencies of selected degree adverbs between English nativespeakers and Chinese English learners in their spoken English, and then, the collocations ofeach selected degree adverb are searched out to make comparisons of collocation types,semantic prosody and colligation of them in the two corpora. Based on the data and thequantitative and qualitative methods, the similarities and differences of the using features ofdegree adverbs between native speakers and Chinese EFL students are analyzed anddiscussed.The results show that, in general, Chinese EFL students can use degree adverbs inaccordance with English native speakers in aspect of semantic prosody in their oralproduction. However, there are some differences in the usage of degree adverbs between themin aspect of collocation types and frequencies, which shows that Chinese learners do not graspsufficient knowledge about degree adverbs and not use degree adverbs as idiomatically asnative speakers do in communication. To be specific,(1) The frequency study on the degreeadverbs shows that compared with native speakers, Chinese English learners tend to overuseboosters and underuse maximizers and downtoners. Besides, apart from a few degree adverbs,most degree adverbs are insufficiently used by Chinese English learners, which means thatChinese English learners like to depend on limited familiar degree adverbs in eachsubcategory to modify. Specifically, they like to use totally in maximizers, very, really inBoosters, and almost, nearly in downtoners.(2) The ratio of types to tokens of collocations ofdegree adverbs indicates that compared with native speakers, the ranges of collocations ofthem used by Chinese English learners are far narrower.(3) The analysis on the collocationsof each degree adverb reveals that some typical collocation types used by English nativespeakers are seldom used by Chinese English students, such as extremely important, perfectlyprepared, highly skilled, etc. While some of collocations commonly used by Chinese students are seldom used by native speakers, such as completely disabled, completely tired, totallydisabled, rather shocked, somewhat afford, etc.This corpus-based study on the usage of degree adverbs by Chinese EFL students in theiroral production will give helpful information for the teaching and learning practice of degreeadverbs in the future.