A Corpus-based Study Of With-pattems In High School Students’ English Writings

The patterns of a word can be defined as all the words and structures which are regularly associated with the word and which contribute to its meaning.A pattern can be identified if a combination of words occurs relatively frequently,if it is dependent on a particular word choice,and if there is a clear meaning associated with it.(Hunston&Francis 2000:37).A large number of corpus-based learner language studies have been carried out,which can not only reveal the typical lexical grammatical patterns of the target language,but also directly reflect the deviation of L2 learners in the use of vocabulary and grammar.The typical patterns and deviations found can directly serve the teaching practice.However,the existing researches mainly focus on the description of the behavioral characteristics of second-language words of college English learners,but pay little attention to the lexical and grammatical patterns in primary and secondary English learning,and there are few reports on how to apply the corpus research results to English teaching in basic education.In view of this,this study takes the with-pattern as the main object of study to reveals its main type characteristics in native English speakers,discovers the deviation of high school English learners in using this pattern,and explores the main ways to improve this pattern of teaching in the current situation of English learning in primary and secondary schools based on the findings.The corpus used in this study includes ST2(high school English sub-corpus)of Chinese Learners English Corpus(CLEC)and Corpus of Contemporary American English(COCA).With-pattern is one of the most common grammatical structures in English.According to the current situation of middle school English learning,with-pattern is difficult for middle school students to learn.This study is expected to solve the problem of students’ with-pattern learning difficulties,and to further improve teachers’ teaching.The theoretical framework of this study is co-selection(including the co-selection of vocabulary and grammar,words and words,and form and meaning).The study uses native language corpus and learner corpus to explore and solve the following research problems:(ⅰ)Compared with native speakers,what is characteristic of the colligations of with-patterns in Chinese high school students’writings?(ⅱ)Compared with native speakers,what is characteristic of the semantic preference and semantic prosody of with-patterns in Chinese high school students’ writings?(ⅲ)How should we develop an improved model for teaching with-patterns?This research adopts the research method based on corpus,with 852 data from ST2(selecting all data of with-patterns in ST2)in ST2 and 1,000 data from COCA respectively.Then,these samples are analyzed to obtain research data.In this thesis,quantitative and qualitative analysis is also pursued to guarantee the reliability of research data.The major findings of this research are as follows:Firstly,compared with the native English speaking students,the writing of Chine se high school students has obvious colligation characteristics.The difference is that Chinese learners tend to use "VP+with+NP","AP+with+NP" more,and less use "(BE+)V+-ed+with+(NP+V+-ed/V+-ing)","PP+with+NP","With+NP,S1"(S1 means a sente nce)and "Adv+with".Secondly,compared with native speakers,there are obvious semantic preference and semantic prosody in the writing of Chinese high school students.Chinese learners are more likely to use "VP+with+NP" and "AP+with+NP" to express their happy,willing and satisfied feeling,while native speakers are less likely to use this pattern to express their positive attitude.For native speakers,they tend to use some adjectives such as "familiar","consistent","compatible" and these adjectives indicate a connected state.Some negative adjectives are used by native speakers to express their unwilling attitude,such as "heavy","upset","abusive".Furthermore,native speakers tend to use "NPs" of inhuman while learners use "NPs" of human more.So for learners,they should pay more attention to those adjectives and inhuman "NPs" in their writing.Native speakers tend to use more of the following four with-patterns.In the pattern "PP+with+NP",learners mainly use "in a hurry with","in the possession with","in harmony with" and so on,while for native speakers,the PPs are mainly "in accordance with","in connection with","in patient with","in close touch with" and so on.Learners tend to use this pattern to express approving and neutral attitude.For "(BE+)V+-ed+with+(NP+V+-ed/V+-ing)" pattern,native speakers mainly use"associated","compared","concerned" to express the neutral attitude and they tend to use"charged" to express their disapproving attitude.These are less used by learners,so they should learn to use these V-eds more in their writing.In "With+NP,S1" pattern,native speakers sometimes use negative preference of "NPs",such as "loss","attle",while for learners,they seldom use these negative preference,so for learners they should pay attention to negative "NPs".In "Adv+with" pattern,compared with learners,native speakers tend to use it to express their neutral attitude indicating an accompanying state,such as "along with","as with" and "together with",which are seldom used by learners.Therefore,learners should learn to use this pattern more in their writing.Thirdly,the improved teaching model includes two parts.The first part is the patterns that learners can acquire relatively well,such as NP+with+NP+VP,Be(+NP)+with+NP.For these patterns,no specific adjustments are required.The second part is the patterns that learners fail to acquire well.The first sub-group is the patterns that are influenced by the mother tongue and grammar teaching.The comparison between English and Chinese should be strengthened,and the teaching of relevant patterns should be suggested according to the differences.The second sub-group is the specific part of the target language.It is necessary to strengthen the relevant practice,such as reading articles and doing more exercises.In the future learning of prepositions,we should not only pay attention to the memorization of the collocation of prepositions,but also combine the semantic features characteristics to teach prepositions.