Corpus-based Comparative Research In The Abstracts Of Curriculum And Instruction Doctoral Dissertations By Chinese And Foreign Students

An excellent dissertation comprises an innovative topic,strict logic and academic nature,which is usually measured by its academic vocabulary,a key factor that cannot be ignored.This study,through analyzing the topic selection and academic vocabulary in the abstracts,aims to find out the differences in topic selection and academic vocabulary of Chinese and foreign Curriculum and Instruction Doctoral dissertations.Adopted in the research are comparative research method and corpus-based research method.The dissertations of abstracts used in this study are searched by discipline and downloaded from ProQuest database and China National Knowledge Infrastructure(CNKI)published from 2014 to 2017.In order to explore the academic and high-frequency vocabulary of the study,a raw corpus(CIC)with 64,562 words in total is generated,and it contains two sub-corpora,Chinese CIC and Foreign CIC.Furthermore,manual statistical classification method is used to investigate the differences in topic selection between Chinese and foreign abstracts of the dissertations.The main findings of the study are: 1)Popular topics in Chinese and foreign Doctoral dissertations all include “curriculum and pedagogy” and “TESOL”.But differently,there are topics related to “educational technology” in the foreign dissertations,while there is no related topic in China,and the research directions of “TESOL” vary — the directions on language input teaching such as reading,vocabulary and grammar are the majority in China,while topics on language output teaching such as oral English and writing are the mainstream abroad.2)Based on the Academic Word List produced by Coxhead,the coverage of the academic vocabulary in China is 14.05%,with 410 word families of academic words included;the coverage of foreign academic vocabulary is 15.45%,which contains 315 academic word families.In addition,this study finds 8 special terms in the abstracts of the Curriculum and Instruction field,which are “curriculum”,“feedback”,“pedagogy”,“pedagogical”,“reform”,“proficiency”,“self-reflection” and “score”.3)Out of the 5 verb families with the highest frequency at home and abroad,3 common verb families emerge from the two sub-corpora,which are “learn”,“study” and “use”.Despite different collocations of the words,their basic usages are similar.In addition to the 3 common verb families,the most frequently used verbs in China are “base” and “reform”,and the most frequently used verbs abroad are “change” and “include”.The findings of the study have the following implications for Chinese students majoring in Curriculum and Instruction: 1)The topic selection of dissertation on the “curriculum and pedagogy” has grown comparatively dated abroad,and students should choose it with innovation.2)Students should consider choosing language output teaching directions in addition to topics of language input.3)Students can choose topics related to “educational technology” according to their own conditions,a direction innovative but also challenging.Additionally,the implication to the teaching of the academic writing course of Curriculum and Instruction is that academic vocabulary should be included in the teaching tasks and should also be one of the final assessment standards.