Writer/Reader Visibility In Chinese Advanced EFL Learner Argumentative Writings

Ever since the book Learner English on Computer edited by Granger got published in1988, studies of interlanguage by means of data drawn from the learner corpus have become flourishing. Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) has begun to get a superior position in interlanguage study and has been a hot topic in corpus linguistics ever since.Among these researches many focus on the English compositions written by EFL learners of other mother tongue backgrounds than Chinese. The thesis aims to study writer/reader visibility in Chinese advanced EFL learners’ writings on the basis of comparisons with that of native speakers. Writer/reader visibility is regarded as an important indicator of informality in argumentative writings. It reflects the writer’s self-mention as well as his/her interaction with the readers. Based on Petch-Tyson (1998)’s research framework, this corpus-based study focuses on the informality presented in argumentative writings of advanced EFL learners in China. The learner corpora used in this study include argumentative essays written by English major students in TEM4, TEM8and other argumentative essays written by Chinese EFL learners at different levels. The data of the learners at different levels are compared with each other and with the data drawn from LOCNESS, an English native speaker corpus, in order to find out if there is a correlation between writer/reader visibility and learners’ English level. Five corpora are used as reference in this study to find out the rules or change in tendency as the learners’English language proficiency improves.The most important criterion is writer/reader visibility, and the other criterion adopt in this study is genre analysis through key word approach and lexical variation which is used to examine language features. The key word approach is proposed by Tribble (1999). This thesis will use this method to make a comparison of CEM and LOCNESS, taking English Editorial Corpus (EEC) as a reference. At the same time, lexical variation is also taken into consideration, tested by the WordList of WordSmith Tools.Research results show that Chinese EFL learners have the tendency to employ more informal language compared with native English speakers. Words reflecting writer/reader visibility in CEM are nearly three times as many as those in LOCNESS. In terms of lexical variation, the ratio difference between the two corpora is also huge. Meanwhile, the degree of informality decreases with the development of their English proficiency both for Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers.Suggestions for teaching are accordingly made for the future instructions of EFL writing. The study aims to help students be aware that expressions adopted in writing should be different from those in spoken language. The author suggests that Chinese EFL learners should learn the features of formal English writing and try to reduce writer/reader visibility and raise the formality in argumentative writing. Corpus should be employed as an effective tool by teachers and learners in language teaching and learning.