Evaluative Orientations And Proficiency Variation: An Exploratory Study Of Adjective Patterns In Chinese Tertiary EFL Learners’ Argumentative Writings

This thesis reports a study that investigated the use of adjective patterns followedby a clause by Chinese EFL learners in written English. The purpose of the study is tofind to what extent the evaluative meanings could predict the use of adjective patterns,thus enhancing our understanding of the use of the adjective patterns and thefunctions of the evaluative language as well as yielding some insights into theacquisition of the interlanguage.The data selected for the present study were composed of thee parts, namely,year-two students’ writings (the intermediate learners) in the national Written EnglishTest for English Majors (Band4,2005-2006), year-four students’ writings (theadvanced learners) in the national Written English Test for English Majors (Band8,2005-2006), and the argumentative writings of the native speakers in LOCNESS(Louvain Corpus of English Essays). The researcher conducted a quantitative study inanalyzing the data at hand, and made a parameter-based examination of the evaluativeorientations encapsulated in the adjective patterns, with the latter supplementing theformer. The analysis generated the following findings:Compared with the native speakers, the use of the adjective patterns was foundunder-represented in Chinese EFL learners’ argumentative writings compared with theperformance of the native speakers. This may be accounted for by the underuse of thepatterns ADJ1to-inf and It v-link ADJ wh. Conversely, the pattern It v-link ADJ for nto-inf was over-represented in both learner groups, while there seemed to be noremarkable difference in the patterns of ADJ1that and ADJ1wh. It is notable that noinstance of the pattern ADJ-ing was found in the learner corpora. As to the pattern Itv-link ADJ to-inf, the intermediate-level English learners tended to overuse it while itwas the other way around for the advanced-level English learners. For the last patternIt v-link ADJ that left, a underuse tendency was found in the data of the intermediatewhile there was no significant difference in the data of the advanced. With respect to the preferred adjectives used, the advanced-level English learnersperformed better than the intermediate in that more preferred adjectives used werealike to those by the native speakers. Furthermore, it is not surprising to find moreerrors in the corpus of the intermediate-level English learners than in the corpus of theadvanced-level English learners. But it is not so straightforward to categorize theseerrors into interlingual or intralingual types. In fact, most of the errors learnerscommitted were induced by the phraseology effects.As to the predictability of the evaluative meanings, only four adjective patternswere taken into account due to their salient occurrences and their estimation indifferentiating the population, i.e. ADJ1to-inf, It v-link ADJ to, It v-link ADJ for sbto-inf, and It v-link ADJ that. The results indicate that evaluative meanings could actas the predicating factors of the selection of ADJ patterns. In different patterns,different parameters (evaluative meanings) serve as the vane of proficiency levels. Inother words, learners at different stages of language learning may tend to beassociated with some particular evaluative meanings.Furthermore, both developmental patterns and polarity of evaluative meaningswere also investigated in the present study. The results indicate that the developmentpatterns of evaluation could be elicited from the adjective patterns. In terms of thepolarity of evaluative meanings, both Chinese learners and the native speakers had a“bias towards positive items”. But, it is also pointed out that another direction biaswas present with the adjective patterns that meet the evaluative meaning of“Difficulty”.Both theoretical and practical implications can be found in the present study.Theoretically, some of the findings of L2learners’ evaluation have developed thecurrent theories of evaluation and reevaluated the Pattern Grammar approach, whileothers have contributed to the theory of error analysis from a lexico-grammarperspective. Practically, some discussions concerning the multivariate analysis and theimplementation of the Pattern Grammar approach are significant in language researchand language teaching.