Corpus-based Analysis Of Lexical Chunks In Chinese EFL Scholars' English For Academic Purpose

An important component of fluent linguistic production is the control of the multiword expressions referred as "clusters", "chunks" or "bundles". Among four basic English skills concerning listening, speaking, reading and writing, English writing as a language competence-productive skill is the most difficult part to command. The reason why EFL learners cannot acquire a good command of English writing is that they are short of word collocations, phrases and expressions related to the topic of the composition stored in their memory. This "prefabricated structure in memory" is called "chunks" or "lexical chunks".The development of corpus-driven research provides researchers with a new way to explore a langue by bringing in a more objective frequency-based approach. The target chunks extracted by concordancing tool WordSmith 5.0 in the study from two corpora-Chinese Academic Writing English Corpus (CAWEC) and Foreign Academic Writing English Corpus (FAWEC), were examined by log-likelihood ratio and standard frequency and analyzed functionally and structurally in order that characteristics of Chinese EFL scholars'chunk using in English writing for academic purpose were summarized. The paper was devoted to investigate and analyze the most frequently used chunks in published English articles written by Chinese EFL scholars and compared their usage with that of the native counterparts.Findings from the study demonstrated that:(1) Overuse and underuse can be summarized as the two common characteristics of chunk using by Chinese EFL scholars, and one possible cause assumed by the author is the inflexibility of chunk using; (2) In the functional analysis part, one of the characteristics of target chunks used by Chinese EFL scholars is that the function forms are slightly simple and the other is that content chunks takes up a certain proportion as the result from restricted topics; (3) The structure analysis suggests that the varieties of structural groups of both CAWEC and FAWEC are the same except that the types are slightly different and the number of preposition phrase and other phrase used by Chinese EFL scholar is exactly the same with foreign scholars; (4) Chinese EFL scholars show the feature of spoken register in English writing for academic purpose.Based on these findings, this study portrayed characteristics of Chinese EFL scholars'chunk using, and provided practical suggestions for the teaching of EFL writing for EFL teachers and writing English paper for academic purpose for postgraduate. Additionally, the study contributed to the spread of academic achievements internationally and the publication of academic journal articles on international journals.