The Differences Between English Written And Spoken Texts Of EFL Learners

Based on the spoken and written texts collected from 75 non-English major Chinese university students,we built a spoken and written dependency treebank of the same group of Chinese English learners using Stanford Parser under the theoretical framework of dependency grammar.Since this is a parallel treebank across speaking and writing with the same group of students,factors such as topics and individual differences are well controlled,reducing the influence of external factors on the language production across the two modalities.This treebank provides valuable information to investigate the differences between speaking and writing in the interlanguage and the underlying processing mechanism.On the basis of this treebank,we first compared the complexity and accuracy of the two language outputs of the same group of students,examined the differences between learners’ writing and speaking ability,and summarized typical errors,to explore the different cognitive processing mechanisms.Secondly,the relationship between dependency distance,modalities and interlanguage accuracy was analyzed.Finally,the relationship between the language complexity,accuracy,and learners’ language production proficiency was analyzed through the machine learning model and the explanatory power of each indicator on the language production proficiency was calculated.By analyzing the results,the conclusion was drawn that the learners’ writing output is better than their oral output in terms of complexity,due to sufficient planning time,controllability,and the plethora of training in writing.Speaking requires continuous output and simultaneous effort in terms of both meaning and form,the cognitive load of which is far greater than that of writing,and speaking is more vulnerable to the negative transfer from the mother tongue.Statistics also show that language accuracy in oral performance is lower than that in writing,with typical errors of misuse of singular or plural nouns,misuse of verb forms,and misuse of Chinese sentence patterns.In addition,it was found that dependency distance and language modalities will affect the error rate.The long dependency distance results in significantly higher error rates in both spoken and written texts.The error rate of L2 spoken language in the long and short dependency distances is higher than that of writing in the corresponding dependency distance.Based on the theories of L2 processing models of different interlanguage modalities,the correlation between the performance of students’ writing and speaking and their language proficiency was calculated.The result shows that writing has a dominant effect among Chinese English learners over their oral English.Writing can better reflect the students’ language level,in which learners can more accurately use complex words and sentence patterns they have mastered,and usually,there are fewer errors in the written interlanguage.It is advisable for English teachers to strengthen students’ oral English so as to achieve automaticity or approximate automaticity through continuous practice.