A Comparative Study Of Text-Oriented Bundles In M.A.Theses By Native Speakers Of Chinese&English

Text-oriented bundles are one kind of lexical bundles that have the function of organizing the texts.Lexical bundles refer to the most frequently recurring multiword sequences,of three or more words in a register or genre.Cortes(2004)held the opinion that mastering the lexical bundles of a specific register is the marker of proficiency of a language.Thus,mastering text-oriented bundles of a specific register is the marker of proficiency of organizing the texts.Most of the previous studies are concerned with the text-oriented bundles used in journals or doctoral dissertations.Few of them analyzed in detail the text-oriented bundles used in M.A.theses from the perspectives of types and distribution,structures and functions.This research aims to find out the similarities and differences between the text-oriented bundles in M.A.theses in applied linguistics used by Chinese EFL(English as a foreign language)learners and native speakers of English respectively and analyze the possible reasons for the overuse and underuse of the text-oriented bundles by Chinese EFL learners in comparison to the text-oriented bundles used by native speakers of English.There are three questions in this research:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the types and distributions of the text-orientated bundles used by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the structures and functions of the text-orientated bundles used by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English?(3)What are the possible reasons for the overuse and underuse of the text-oriented bundles by Chinese EFL learners in comparison to the text-oriented bundles used by native speakers of English?To answer these research questions,two corpora were built.They are CWC(Chinese Writers’ Corpus)and NWC(Native Writers’ Corpus).They both consist of28 M.A.theses in applied linguistics.Besides,the number of tokens in these two corpora are similar.The eligible text-oriented bundles extracted from CWC and NWC must meet frequency and dispersion criteria: occur at a frequency of at least 20 times per million words,and across at least five different texts.LL(Log-Likelihood Ratio Calculator)was used to analyze the data.The results of this research show that:(1)Similar to native speakers of English,Chinese EFL learners rarely use the 5-6-word text-oriented bundles.However,incomparison with native speakers of English,Chinese EFL learners overused text-oriented bundles in both types and tokens.(2)In terms of structure,there is no significant difference in using “Noun phrase +other post modifier fragments”between Chinese EFL learners and native English speakers.But Chinese EFL learners underused NP-based phases and PP-based phrases and overused VP-based phrases.What’s more,the passive voice was overused as well.In function,some similarities can be found in using the text-oriented bundles which work as framing signals by Chinese EFL learners and native speakers of English.Nevertheless,the text-oriented bundles which mark causative relation and work as structural signals were underused.In contrast,the text-oriented bundles which establish contrastive links,mark inferential relations and indicate purpose were overused by Chinese EFL learners.Though in quantity,Chinese EFL learners have used enough for some text-oriented bundles.However,the types still remain to be increased and the accuracy and authenticity should be improved.(3)Possible reasons for overusing and underusing the text-oriented bundles by Chinese EFL learners can be concluded from four aspects.Firstly,Chinese EFL learners possibly feel safe to use some familiar high-frequency text-oriented bundles,resulting in repeated use of only some bundles while neglecting others.Secondly,the imperfect language teaching system might also have negative impact on text-oriented bundles acquisition.Thirdly,Chinese EFL learners lack of the awareness of using different text-oriented bundles in different registers,which leads to the misuse of text-oriented bundles to some extent.Fourthly,fossilization might also be a reason which can explain the misuse of the text-oriented bundles by Chinese EFL learners.The findings of this study have implications for both teaching and learning text-oriented bundles in academic writings.Teachers should guide students to use more diverse and accurate text-oriented bundles so as to be more authentic in using text-oriented bundles.As Chinese EFL learners,it is important to strengthen the awareness of using different text-oriented bundles in different registers.The limitation of this study in that the corpora of this study is not big enough,and the data were only collected from M.A.theses without comparison with the text-oriented bundles used in doctoral dissertation and academic journals.