The Use Of Definite Article In Chinese English Learners' Academic Writing:A Perspective Of Lexical Bundles

The English article system includes three types of articles:the definite article the,the indefinite article a/an and the zero article(?).However,they are quite complex in actual use.Master(1990)states that "The English article system is one of the most difficult aspects of English grammar for nonnative speakers and the latest to be fully acquired".And articles as a key part of second language acquisition pose a great challenge for the second language learners.Therefore,the main purpose of this paper is to explore the use of the definite article by Chinese learners in academic English writing.Different from the traditional research on definite articles,this paper takes definite articles in lexical bundles as the research object to explore their usage features in lexical bundles.At the same time,since the scope of this study is academic English writing,a self-built learner corpus is more in line with the purpose of the study.The English learner corpus is composed of-30 theses written by masters who have graduated in 2017 and 2018 from Shaanxi Normal University.And all of them major in foreign linguistics and applied linguistics.After deleting Chinese abstracts,contents,tables,figures,references and appendices,each thesis has about 21,000 words,totaling about 630,000 words.At the same time,a native speaker corpus is established as a reference corpus to co1pare with the learner corpus.This thesis is concerned with the tollowing questions:1)What are the differences between Chinese English learners and native speakers in using lexical bundles containing definite article in academic English writing-2)What are the differences between Chinese English learners' use of the core expressions of lexical bundles and the use of lexical bundles themselves in English academic writing?3)What are the characteristics ot article errors in lexical bundles when Chinese English learners use target lexical bundles in academic English writing?Based on the above research questions,the research procedures of this study can be roughly divided into three steps.Firstly,160 lexical bundles with definite articles selected from Biber et al.'s(1999)research are searched one by one in the self-built corpus of Chinese learners,and the frequency of each lexical bundle is obtained.Then the 160 lexical bundles are searched in the native speaker corpus to obtain the corresponding data.The data gotten from these two corpora are compared and analyzed.Secondly,the core expressions of 160 lexical bundles are extracted and searched in the self-built corpus of Chinese learners,and the frequency and specific examples of them are obtained.The results are compared with the data obtained f-rom the Chinese learner corpus in the first step.Finally,the specific examples retrieved in the second step will be examined one by one to confirm the use of definite articles,that is,whether there are errors,and then conduct data analysis.At the same time,the possible reasons for their misuses are also provided.Through data analysis,the following conclusions can be drawn:1)compared with native speakers,Chinese advanced English learners show a lower level of diversity in the use of lexical bundles with definite articles,but a slightly higher frequency than native speakers.This result supports previous studies in which even high-level L2 learners show relatively low tokens of bundle types.2)The core expressions used by L2 learners are significantly more than the target lexical bundles in frequency and variety.Apart from the correct expressions ot the lexical bundles,there are numerous misuses of definite articles in lexical bundles,which reflect that the second language learners with high level of-English proficiency still can not fully grasp the usage ot definite articles.3)After classifying and counting the types of errors,it is found that when high-level L2 learners use bundles containing definite articles,their errors are mainly the omission of definite articles.The reasons for this phenomenon may come from three aspects:language transfer;the eftects of-article semantics;the effects of the awareness of learners.The above research shows that advanced learners still misuse definite articles when using bundles containing definite articles,which proves once again the importance of definite articles iii language learning.At the same time,it has certain instructional significance in English teaching.That is to say,in English teaching,teachers can advisably emphasize the definite article in lexical bundles,so as to improve students'awareness of definite articles in the use of lexical bundles and improve their ability to use language accurately.