The Orality Of Chinese Scholars' Written English

China English is considered to be a variety of English,which has drawn much scholastic attention.Written English and spoken English are two forms of it and the mixed use of spoken English and written English happens a lot in learners' English output whereas it is not clear about the mixed use in users' English output.Few studies have explored the mixed use in users' English output.Scholars can be regarded as the advanced English users so this study aims to explore the mixed use of spoken English and written English in scholars' English output.Written English is used a lot in academic research for scholars so it is really important for them to master it.Thus,this study aims to investigate the mixed use of spoken English and written English in Chinese scholars' written English to examine the orality of Chinese scholars' written English,in which the spoken features of written English in China English are demonstrated.Two corpora are established with 10 academic articles from Chinese Journal of Applied Linguistics and 10 academic articles from Applied Linguistics.The study is conducted out from three aspects,including writer/reader visibility,lexical level,and syntactic level.Contrastive analysis method is applied in the study,through which the features in the three aspects are compared between two corpora.The result shows that Chinese scholars' written English has a lower orality tendency in writer/reader visibility while it shows a greater orality tendency in sentence level.There is no obvious orality tendency in lexical level in Chinese scholars' written English.Chinese scholars' written English presents fewer writer/reader visibility features,especially fewer first person pronouns.The distributions of vocabulary are similar in written English by Chinese scholars and that by native English scholars.Chinese scholars tend to use shorter and simpler sentences comparing to native English scholars and they also use fewer passive sentence structures comparing with native English scholars.Less demonstration of writer/reader visibility may stem from their high English proficiency,the training on English writing and the awareness of the academic writing rules.While more short and simple sentences and fewer passive structures may originate from the influence of Chinese culture and language habit.The findings of this study are supposed to offer some suggestions on the features of China English and English education in China.