A Comparative Study Of Sentence Types In The Same Topic Compositions Of Sino-US College Students

English sentence patterns are sentence forms constituted by various types of English sentences and diverse grammatical phenomena and they are syntactic rules that are analyzed,generalized and summarized by human beings.Therefore,the sentence pattern is an indispensable part of English teaching and it is also crucial for students to learn English well.In the process of English teaching,motivating students to master a series of sentence patterns can make their language inputs more complete,and make their outputs more authentic,gradually achieving the transfer of language learning from knowledge acceptance to language application.This thesis adopts the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and corpus linguistics as theoretical instructions,takes 200 Sino-US college students’English writings with the same topic as the research subject in the ICNALE corpus and utilizes the quantitative and qualitative analysis methods to explore its main features of sentence patterns.The analysis results show that there are significant differences in the use of sentence patterns,sentence lengths,clause types,predicate verbs and special sentence patterns.And specific results indicate as below:1)The use of declarative sentences occupies the largest proportion in both Sino-US college students’writings,but Chinese students use more interrogative sentences and connect sentences with more commas or semicolons.2)The simple sentence is the main sentence pattern used by Chinese learners and the compound-complex sentence is less commonly adopted.On the contrary,the complex sentence is the main sentence pattern used by American students,and its sentence length is significantly longer than that of Chinese students.3)In terms of the simple sentence,Chinese learners use more“S-V-O_d”sentence structures while American students use more“S-V-O_i-O_d”sentence structures.4)In terms of the complex sentence,there are significant differences in the use of the adverbial clause,object clause and attributive clause.Specifically,significant differences are also in the use of the adverbial clause of condition,time and reason.Chinese learners overuse the pre-positional adverbial clauses,and habitually utilize the object clause of“I think that”and“I know that”,but attributive clauses are less commonly used.On the contrary,the adverbial clause is usually post-positional in American students’writings.The number of object clauses exceeds that of Chinese students and the leading word“that”is often omitted.Besides,attributive clauses are frequently used by native speakers with the leading word“that”.5)In terms of special sentence patterns,active sentences are frequently adopted by Chinese students and they use more“There be”sentence patterns to convey information and“It is+adj.(for sb.)to do sth.”sentence types to express attitudes while American students can flexibly make use of various passive sentences.The use of“There be”sentence structures and extraposition structures are multifarious.And the main reasons for above differences are the influence of psychological mechanism,difference of thinking patterns and interference of the first language.The comparative study on the syntactic features of Sino-US college students’English writings will contribute to comprehensively analyze and explain phenomena in ESL writings and systematically investigate the linguistic characteristics of Chinese college students’English writings,which not only assist teachers to adopt corpus as a method to probe into language in the process of foreign language teaching,expand language material resources,but also help students to discover learning gaps by comparison,thus effectively improving their English writing levels.