Native Speakers’ And Chinese Learners’ Use Of Adverb-alone English Utterances

Adverbs ending in-ly are often used as a single utterance in a dialogue to express the speaker’s stance and attitude.The strategic use of such adverbs plays an important role in smoothing the dialogue.This kind of words have often been included in studies on adverb placement or interactive discourse,but as a special kind of words,such–ly-ending adverbs deserve more attention.This research takes advantage of the combination of quantitative methods in corpus research and qualitative methods in discourse analysis to conduct a contrastive interlanguage analysis.It was based on the texts from the Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners,SECCL,and the texts from the native speakers’ spoken English sub-corpus in BNC.Analyses were made to examine the similarities and differences between Chinese English learners and native English speakers in their use of–ly-ending-adverb-alone utterances,in semantic and pragmatic aspects.From the two spoken English corpora were retrieved and selected 10 –ly-ending adverbs like really,absolutely,exactly,certainly,probably,eventually,possibly,actually,precisely and definitely.Based on the semantic,grammatical and pragmatic specification of the target words,they were divided into three subcategories: expressing agreement,expressing the degree of certainty or doubt,and expressing position.The result shows that native English speakers are more inclined to use the–ly-ending-adverb-alone utterances to express their agreement to the speakers(accounting for up to 66.67%).Chinese-speaking English learners are more likely to use these words to express their doubts or even negation to the speakers(accounting for up to 75%).In addition,Chinese English learners’ use of this kind of adverbs lacks variety and appropriate strategies.It can be concluded that Chinese English learners do not have a deep understanding of the pragmatic force of words,and oral English teaching to them is often disconnected from actual situations.Therefore,learners cannot correctly apply communication strategies to oral communication.The result suggests that the content and methods of vocabulary teaching should be improved pertinently.First of all,analyzing native speakers’ habits in vocabulary use can help learners have a better focus and tendency in learning English vocabulary and speaking,achieving twice the result with half effort.Secondly,teachers should cultivate students’ pragmatic awareness when teaching.That is to say,the design of teaching activities should be based on real language use environment.Finally,corpus language research methods can be integrated into foreign language teaching to help students grasp key words and promote their vocabulary learning and use.