A Corpus-Based Study On The Use Of Downtoners By Chinese EFL Learners

This paper reports on a study which remains conspicuously absent from corpus-based research, the use of downtoners by Chinese EFL learners. The research is carried out by making a corpus-based contrastive analysis on patterns of use of downtoners in Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC) and the British National Corpus (BNC) with respect to the frequency of and collocates with each selected downtoner and examining features of misuse of downtoners in Chinese English Learner Corpus. Major findings are outlined that Chinese EFL learners tend to underuse most of the downtoners and the collocates associated with different downtoners in CLEC exhibit little semantic and grammatical variation. The empirical evidence also shows that Chinese EFL learners display certain features of misuse such as errors in word choice and errors in part of speech. In the light of the corpus-based evidence, the paper argues for the importance of incorporating corpus-based findings into instructional programs and materials design, emphasizing downtoner collocations and running concordances in the teaching process.