Stylistic Features Of Written Language Between Chinese EFL Leaners And Native Speakers: A Corpus-based Study

Style is a functional variant of language usage,and it is a language expression style to meet different communicative needs.English style is divided into the spoken and written styles.Stylistic feature refers to the linguistic phenomena with significant differences in frequency between spoken and written styles.As an implicit standard to measure the quality of composition,written language style plays an important role in improving writing skills of the students.However,the previous studies of the stylistic features either only focus on vocabulary and collocation or only pay attention to passive voice or conjunction.It is insufficient for a more in-depth and comprehensive study on the differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the usage characteristics of written language.It is of great significance for English teaching and learning to study the stylistic features of written language of Chinese EFL learners,which is conducive to improving their abilities in English writing.Hence,the study adopts corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA),respectively selecting 50 articles with 27,051 tokens from Ten-thousand English Compositions of Chinese Learners Corpus(TECCL)and 27,591 tokens from Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays(LOCNESS)as the data sources.Taking Ant Conc3.5.8,Tree Tagger and log-likelihood as research tools,this thesis attempts to explore a comprehensive analysis on learners’ usage characteristics of written language on the lexical,syntactic and textual levels,then answers the following three questions:(1)What are the differences in the distribution features of written style between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers?(2)What are the reasons for the stylistic features of Chinese EFL learners in written language?(3)What is the role pedagogical instruction playing in studying the stylistic features of Chinese EFL learners in written language?The research findings show that:(1)There are some major differences between Chinese EFL learners and native speakers in the stylistic features of written language.On the lexical level,the lexical density of Chinese EFL learners is 66.4%,the lexical sophistication is 8.2%,and the lexical diversity is 41.50.All the three values of Chinese EFL learners are lower than those of native speakers,and their word frequency presents colloquial characteristics.On the syntactic level,the average sentence length of Chinese EFL learners is 16.39 words,the use frequency of passive sentences is 24(percentage),which is lower than that of native speakers.In addition,the use frequency and diversity of derivative nouns are lower than that of native speakers.On the textual level,the average frequency of personal pronoun of Chinese EFL learners is 28.7,higher than that of native speakers;and the number of conjunctions used by Chinese EFL learners is 1,262,lower than that of native speakers.(2)The comparative study basing on corpus-based Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis(CIA)shows that the usage characteristics of written style from Chinese EFL learners are affected by multiple factors,such as L1 transfer,L2 input,L2 level and language fossilization.The differences in the way of their expression are affected by the transfer of native language.Using some rules of the native language for a long time as a temporary transitional means would make second language learners fossilized in the process of writing.Besides,the lack of depth and breadth of second language knowledge reflects the insufficient L2 input and L2 level of learners.(3)Teachers should learn more about the differences of the usage characteristics in written language of Chinese EFL learners and native speakers,attach more importance to cultivating students’ stylistic awareness in English teaching,and use authentic corpus-based materials for teaching.This thesis is expected to provide some implications for second language teaching and learning.