A Corpus-based Study Of Use Of Very And Too By Chinese EFL Learners In Their Oral Production

This study investigates Chinese EFL learners'use of the high frequency intensifiers of very and too in their oral production. The main questions addressed are: Do learners tend to over- or under-use intensifiers of very and too? Are these intensifiers error-prone or safe?To answer these questions, authentic learner data has been compared with native speaker data using computerized corpora to explore the differences in the use of the two intensifiers by Chinese EFL learners and that by native English speakers. Learner data were taken from SWECCL, a Chinese learner corpus, and native speaker data from the spoken BNC. By using Concordancer, both very and too with all of their collocations were retrieved and calculated for analysis. Data analysis generated the following major findings:In the first place, Chinese EFL learners tend to overuse the intensifier of very, but, such a tendency is not found in the use of too, which suggests that Chinese learners'preference for the use of very to that of too is most likely to be L1-related as apparently indicated in some of the case analysis. The possible explanation may also go to the linguistic fact that the intensifier of too is relatively narrower or less flexible in lexical meaning in comparison with the word very.Secondly, the Chinese EFL learners have no difficulty using the collocation of"very/too plus adjectives or adverbs", in which the two words indicate themselves in intensification, but in the case of"very", there are a few instances of misuse of very collocated with verb and preposition. Interestingly, similar misuse is also found in the native English speakers'production. The misuse of the intensifier of very may reflect more or less the characteristics of oral language but does not suggest that the misuse is unique to the learner language. In the case of"too", occasional instances of misuse are found merely in the learner data, and these cases are picked out for detailed analysis and the miscollocated types are related to L1 transfer such as take good care of misused as take too care about.Thirdly, in the two corpora,"very important"is the most frequently used collocation in the learner data while"very much"enjoys the highest frequency of use in the native speaker data. However, it is interesting to note that no instances of"very much"are found in the Chinese EFL learners'6 most frequently used collocations. The possible explanation for the under-use of"very much"is the effect of topic-relatedness. In the case of"too","too much"is most frequently used by both the learners and the native speakers, which implies that Chinese EFL learners take"too much"as a lexical chunk and become also native-like in this respect.Pedagogically, this study makes a suggestion that L2 classroom teaching may provide concordance-based exercises as a way of raising EFL learners'awareness of the complexity of such high frequency words as very and too.