A Corpus-based Contrastive Study On Reporting In English M.A. Theses

Reporting is playing an important role in academic articles because its application in the articles could demonstrate what has been done in the specific field and reveal the gap between the previous and present research by introducing research approaches and findings of other researchers. Whether the writers have used reporting appropriately or not has great impact on the quality of academic articles. Since reporting to literature is such an essential part of academic writing, it is crucial for writers to know how to choose proper and effective reporting in their academic writing. However, some scholars have found that reporting is a source of considerable difficulty for most EFL writers; and my own experience also tells me that, some Chinese learners of English (CLE), even some postgraduates, despite of their proficiency in their major fields, either get confused in choosing reporting to defend their arguments or make very little reference, which undermines the theoretical basis and credibility. Recent years have seen much extensive and revealing work on reporting; however, most of the studies focus on the grammar, semantic and pragmatic analysis of reporting and little attention is paid to the contrastive study on reporting between different groups of English writers and the corpus-based contrastive study on Native Speakers of English (NSE) and Chinese Learners of English (CLE) remain relatively unexplored. Thus it's necessary to carry out a contrastive study on the reporting used by CLE and NSE in M.A. theses. The present author conducts a contrastive analysis on reporting in terms of the following aspects: reporting structure, reporting forms, reporting subjects, semantic categories and frequency of RVs, and compares the different patterns in reporting in the two corpora according to the observed data and analyzes the problems existing in CLE's M.A. theses. Contrastive analyses are provided of features of reporting verbs (RVs) with a corpus-based approach. Two separate corpora, with 200,000 words altogether, are established, which are based on 13 M.A. theses randomly selected from CLE's and NSE's postgraduates'theses. Tags are inserted line by line for each item, and then Wordsmith, a corpus-searching software is adopted to search all these items for further comparison and analysis. Qualitative study is also applied to some paragraphs in CLE's corpus in order to see how well CLE perform in functional aspect of reporting. The results reveal that there are considerable similarities of usage and remarkable differences as well in the use of reporting between the two corpora. Specifically, in terms of reporting structure, NSE's theses possess higher density of reporting; finite verbs prevail over reporting sentences in both corpora, but some reporting structures like reporting nouns, present participles, past participles occur in CLE's corpus in a very limited numbers. Talking about the reporting forms, CLE prefer integral reporting, while NSE prefer non-integral reporting, which indicates CLE concentrate on the one who makes the research while NSE pay more attention to previous findings or researches. Human subjects are widely used in CLE's theses, and nonhuman subjects dominate NSE's corpus, which suggest a more "impersonal"construction in NSE's corpus. Semantically, Research Verbs are preferred by CLE, while more Textual Verbs appear in NSE's theses; at the same time, more Mental Verbs are employed in CLE's theses. Total occurrences of RVs employed in CLE's theses are higher than that in NSE's theses; whereas, a larger variety of RVs are used in NSE's theses and more high-frequency RVs are used in CLE's theses. That is to say, better flexibility and skillfulness are reflected in the use of RVs in NSE's theses. Qualitative study on functions of RVs also finds that some words are overused or used with inappropriateness in CLE's theses and some CLE cannot make RVs serve their purposes well, such as employing one verb while actually meaning another inferred from the context. Possible reasons to account for these differences are provided in Discussion section. These differences could result from diverse language proficiency, different awareness of writing skills, transference of Chinese in the second language learning, different thinking patterns or cultural factors. This thesis attempts to provide new insights into reporting in M.A. theses in contrastive study. It may serve as a guide for CLE to use and understand reporting better and it contributes to relevant classroom teaching in writing of theses and research articles.