A Multidimensional Analysis Of Chinese Non-english Major College Students’ English Argumentative Writings

Writing is one of the vital language skills that English learners must acquire.And argumentative writing accounts for the largest proportion in Chinese students’ English writing.However,many non-English major college students in China regard writing as the most difficult skill for them to attain in English learning,which has a negative impact on their language learning.The author studied the research of argumentative essays written by Chinese students,and found that most of the studies are based on specific language features of the Chinese learners.Co-occur features on stylistic analysis have not received enough attention.In this study,the author built a corpus named CNEMW(Chinese Non-English Majors’ Writing Corpus).Python’s nltk toolkit was engaged to clean and concatenate the corpus,while a multi-dimensional analysis tool was used to tag and analyze the texts.In addition,to better investigate the data,the author selected the native speaker corpus LOCNESS as the reference corpus and used SPSS to do comparative research.This study answers the following two questions:(1)What are the register features of Chinese non-English major students’ argumentative writings?(2)What linguistic variables are used to express the register features of Chinese non-English majors students argumentative writings? What are the main reasons for the occurrence of these linguistic variables?The main findings of this research are as follows:(1)By comparison of the native speaker students’ writings,the register features of Chinese non-English major students’ argumentative writings can be summarized as "informal,colloquial,interactive,non-narrative,technical,affective,and subjective."(2)There are 8 linguistic variables used to express the register features of Chinese non-English majors students argumentative writings,which are:FPP1(first personal pronouns),SPP2(second personal pronouns),IT(the ’it’ pronoun),JJ(attributive adjectives),That verb complements(THVC),Agentless passives(PASS),Past tenses(VBD),Third-person pronouns(TPP3)and Type/token ratio(TTR).The main reasons these variables are misused are due to lack of understanding,the influence of mother tongue transfer,lack of mastery of some complex English sentence patterns and lack of English vocabulary.According to the research results,this study can shed lights on improving the argumentative writing level of Chinese non-English students’ argumentative writings.First of all,students need to pay attention to the linguistic variables that often occur in argumentative writing,and master the knowledge of the correct use of linguistic variables.Secondly,students need to cultivate the awareness of different English writing styles and avoid using wrong register features.Finally,college teachers need to cultivate students’ academic writing ability by improving students’ stylistic awareness and language level,so as to guide students to write properly.