A CLEC-based Analysis Of The Use Of SO

This thesis is aimed at investigating how Chinese English learners use the highly frequently used word SO in English writing, as well as revealing the distribution and characteristics of the word SO used by Chinese English learners by comparing the use of the word in Chinese Learner English Corpus with that in BROWN. This is a corpus-based study and mainly discusses the following questions:i. Do they use SO as frequently as native speakers? If there are any differences, is there one category (or subcategory) that they tend to overuse, underuse, or misuse?ii. What are the patterns of collocation of SO used by advanced Chinese EFL learners? Compared with native speakers, are there significant differences?iii. Are there significant differences between intermediate Chinese EFL learners and advanced learners in using SO in terms of frequency and collocation respectively? iv. What types of errors do the Chinese EFL learners tend to make in usingthe word SO?v. What are the reasons leading to such errors?In order to answer the above-mentioned questions, authentic data collected from Chinese EFL learners was compared with data collected from native speakers by using computerized corpora and database software tool FoxPro 6.0 and SPSS to speed up the initial stage of the linguistic analysis. The results show that Chinese English learners, even at the advanced proficiency level, still inevitably misuse the word SO. The main reasons leading to errors are overgeneralization and the negative transfer of mother tongue.