Quantifying Determiners In Chinese College English Learners’ Writings

Quantifying Determiners(QDs)are learned by Chinese English learners at an early stage.Sinclair(2000)points out QDs are not only high frequency words in English,but also one of the words that English learners tend to misuse.In recent years,English learners’ QD use is mainly analyzed via corpus-based approach.English Profile Program(EPP)is a representative,which aimed to describe lexical and grammatical criterial features based on CLC across six CEFR levels:Al,A2,B1,B2,C1 and C2(Hawkins&Filipovic,2012).The lexical and grammatical properties of EPP are demonstrated in the EVP and EGP.The EVP describes QDs focusing on meanings from A1,A2,B1,B2 to C1.In the EGP,the QD distributes across all six CEFR levels concentrating on forms.With reference to the EVP and EGP.the current study aimed to investigate the QD use by Chinese English learners through a corpus-based method.The current study was initiated to investigate two research questions:1.What are Chinese college English learners’ QD use?2.What are distinguishing features of QD use with reference to the EVP and EGP?The research data was derived from Pigai Wang.More than 9,000 pieces of Chinese non-English major college English learners’written scripts were collected to construct the learner corpus,which was tagged by Tree Tagger 3.0 and analyzed by WordSmith 4.0.Research results indicate that there are nearly 18.6 QDs per thousand words.The QD use increases from freshman to junior in general.QDs in learner corpus are classified into high,medium and low frequency.High frequent QDs consist of more,some,many,no,none of,all,every and lots of/a lot of,account for 82.6%in learner corpus.The medium and low frequent QDs only contribute to 17.4%.In terms of meanings,basic meanings are regularly occurred in learners’ writings,while extended meanings are rarely used;regarding forms,simple forms are more frequently used,which is concluded as "QD+singular/plural/uncountable nouns",whereas complex forms "QD+of+determiners"and "QD+of+pronouns" seldom used.With reference to the EVP,meanings of QDs mainly focus at A levels,accounting for 81.44%of total occurrences;forms of QDs also concentrate at A levels with the proportion of 90.33%with reference to the EGP.General error types in learner corpus involve ungrammatical errors(*every officials)and unidiomatic errors(*all people).The research finds that Chinese college English learners’ QD use still stays at low level.It is expected the current study can have some pedagogical implications.For teachers,targeted instructions can be provided based on QD use in the NEULC;for students,advanced uses can be learned and typical errors are avoided.Meanwhile,the study provides a new perspective for future QD research.