A Contrastive Study On Four-word Lexical Bundles In Argumentative Writing Between Chinese Undergraduates And Native Undergraduates

English writing reflects EFL learners' comprehensive ability of using the language.Developing learners' English writing ability plays a very important role in English teaching.Domestic and foreign scholars have been conducting a lot of researches on various problems in writing teaching and learners' English writing ability.In recent years,with the development of corpus linguistics,contrastive study on parallel corpus paves a new way for the study of English writing.By comparing English writings between native learners and Chinese EFL learners,researchers can draw more implication on English language teaching.A corpus-based empirical study is conducted to investigate the four-word lexical bundles and structural and functional differences of argumentative writings between Chinese undergraduates and native undergraduates based on the two corpora,namely the Louvain Corpus of Native English(LOCNESS)and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL).With the help of software Ant Conc and combined manual sorting,this study selects the most frequently used four-word lexical bundles and makes an investigation of similarities and differences from structural and functional perspectives in these two corpora.This study shows that Chinese undergraduates overuse some lexical bundles and most frequently used bundles by Chinese undergraduates seldom appear in the native undergraduates' writings.Structurally,argumentative writings of English native college students are characterized by phrasal bundles,while those of Chinese college students are characterized by clausal bundles,which is consistent with the research result of Biber.Functionally,both English native undergraduates and Chinese undergraduates rely on research-oriented lexical bundles while there are distinct differences in the use of research-oriented and text-oriented bundles.The lack of text-oriented lexical bundles in Chinese undergraduates' writings leads to defect in the overall writing organization.From this study,it is implicated that teachers should help English learners raise theirawareness of using four-word lexical bundles in their argumentative writings and guide students to understand the language differences and then master the language features.Chinese English learners can take native learners' authentic corpus as an effective reference to help improve their English writing.