A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese And Foreign English Learners’ Syntactic Resonance Features In Conversation

Since Du Bois formally proposed “Dialogic Syntax” in 2014,this new research direction has immediately attracted widespread attention from scholars at home and abroad.“Dialogic Syntax” has become one of the frontier topics in the study of cognitive linguistics both at home and abroad,so it is worth further researching.First of all,since “Dialogic Syntax” is a new theory,most of the domestic and foreign researches on it remain at the theoretical level.Second,no one has yet attempted to compare the SR features of two corpora.Furthermore,few studies have compared the SR features of Chinese and foreign English learners to provide some suggestions for English teaching in China.Based on these considerations,this thesis starts from the theory of DS and compares the SR features in SECCL with those in VOICE,in order to find out the similarities and differences of SR between CELs and FELs in conversations.Based on the results,some suggestions for Chinese English teaching are put forward.This study mainly explores the similarities and differences of SR at the word,chunk,and sentence levels in SECCL and VOICE.The study finds that at the word level,the proportion of word-level SR in VOICE is almost twice that of SECCL;and FELs often use the word-level SR to express their approval of the former speaker,while CELs do not.However,both Chinese and foreign English learners mainly use the word-level SR to confirm the speech information of the previous speaker.As for the chunk-level SR,the proportion of chunk-level SR in VOICE is larger than that in SECCL.In addition,FELs mainly use the chunk-level SR to express their approval of other people’s discourse,while CELs mainly use it to confirm the information of others.At the sentence level,the number of SR in SECCL is larger than that in VOICE;moreover,the proportions of contrastive resonances and disjunctive resonances in SECCL are larger than those in VOICE.However,both CELs and FELs mainly use the sentence-level SR based on expressing their consent to the discourse of others.Also,there are more SR examples of expressing disagreement in SECCL than those in VOICE.On the whole,CELs use SR more often than FELs,while their frequency of usage presents the same implicational hierarchy: sentence-level SR > chunk-level SR > word-level SR.Through analysis,this study also concludes three reasons for these differences: national culture,English expressing ability,and communication strategies.In addition,this study gives advice on Chinese English teaching from three aspects: experiencing authentic English,consolidating language knowledge and diversifying English listening and speaking environment.