A Study On The Syntax Complexity Of Abstracts Of Journal Articles And Theses In ICLE

Academic paper writing is an important way to store scientific research results,disseminate professional knowledge,and promote academic development.In the field of academic writing,there is currently more attention paid to the writing of second language learners,while the difficulties faced by native language speaker students in academic writing due to limited experience,inadequate training,and other challenges have been overlooked.This paper aims to explore the distinctive language features of academic Chinese among three different writing groups,namely second language learner students’theses in Chinese international education,native language speaker students’ theses in Chinese international education,and journal articles,using abstract discourse as a starting point.The paper builds three separate corpora based on different sources:"Native language speaker students’ Thesis Abstracts Corpus in Chinese international education(NTAC),""Second language learner students’ Thesis Abstracts Corpus in Chinese international education(STAC),"and "Journal Abstracts Corpus in Chinese international education(JAC)."A total of 900 abstracts discourse passages were collected,amounting to nearly 500,000 words.LTP and other auxiliary tools were used to calculate different levels of syntactic complexity.The research utilized SPSS 26.0 to conduct differential tests and correlation analyses on the obtained data.By mining the academic Chinese typical features for the three different academic proficiency groups at the lexical,phrasal,and sentence levels,the paper aims to address the following three questions:(1)What are the distinctive characteristics of syntactic complexity,phrasal complexity,and lexical complexity in journal article abstracts,native language speaker students’ thesis abstracts,and second language learner students’ thesis abstracts in Chinese international education?(2)Which indicators in the three different levels can predict the differences in abstract writing proficiency among the three groups,or which indicators are related to abstract writing proficiency?(3)What possible teaching suggestions can be made respectively for Chinese native language speaker students and Chinese second language learner students majoring in Chinese international education with regard to abstract writing?Based on the three questions,the research findings of this paper are as follows:At the lexical level,journal articles present high vocabulary diversity and high pronoun ratios.Native language speaker students’ thesis abstracts have a high vocabulary density,while second language learner students’ thesis abstracts have relatively high conjunction and auxiliary verb ratios.At the phrasal level,journal abstracts present higher overall collocation diversity.Native language speaker students’ thesis abstracts and second language learner students’ thesis abstracts do not exhibit as much overall collocation diversity as journal abstracts,but they do not differ significantly in terms of unique collocation diversity and ratios.At the syntactic level,journal abstracts display a characteristic of a high number of average clauses and T-units,as well as longer average clause and T-unit length,while native language speaker students and second language learner students’ thesis abstracts exhibit the opposite performance on these four dimensions.At the lexical level,lexical diversity is positively correlated with writing proficiency,while conjunction and auxiliary verb ratios are negatively correlated with writing proficiency,which is related to the lack of implicit cohesive means in academic training in Chinese international education.At the phrasal level,overall collocation diversity is positively correlated with writing proficiency,while the proportion of unique collocations in Chinese and writing proficiency is negatively correlated.In the phrasal level,native language speaker students would utilize multiple collocations to reduce redundancy and enrich their discourse.The relationship between the type token ratio of four unique collocations in Chinese and writing proficiency does not conform to the hypotheses,and the reasons require further research.At the sentence level,the average clause length and T-unit length are negatively correlated with writing proficiency.Due to the multiplication relationship,the average number of clauses and T-units can be predictably positively correlated with writing proficiency.Journal abstracts present a characteristic of presents a relatively high number of clauses and high readability.For the native language speaker student group,the focus of academic language training should be on breaking up long sentences into short sentences,avoiding ambiguity caused by long sentences,and diversifying the use of cohesive means.For the second language learner student group,the focus of academic language training should be on removing colloquialization and increasing the rationality of collocations;relatively reducing the proportion of particles in Chinese through teaching implicit cohesive means;reading classic academic journals out loud to cultivate a sense of academic language rhythm,and enhancing the elegance of academic vocabulary.This research has some innovation in the research object,research theory,and research method of academic Chinese.It also has some enlightening implications for the study of academic Chinese and academic Chinese teaching.