| Procedural vocabulary (PV hereafter) is a group of words and phrases that establishes relationship among concepts and thus enables people to explain ideas more efficiently and get their messages across. PV is very useful in both spoken and written communication; however, it has not yet received sufficient attention it deserves, especially empirical research. In this study, the author mainly explores the correlation between PV and writing quality through both quantitative and qualitative data and writing examples of Chinese EFL learners.This study first briefly reviews the theoretical basis of PV-procedural knowledge and understands that PV is the lexical realization of procedural knowledge. Then revised lists of PV are compiled on the basis of Marco's (1999) classification of PV, i.e. PV of logical relations, PV of change of state, PV of functioning, and PV of physical relations. Second, the author makes use of corpus software to search for PV in 120 scored compositions by Chinese EFL learners and calculates the frequencies of each group of PV. Then a correlation analysis is carried out between the frequencies and their writing quality represented by the scores in terms of language, content and organization. The results show that PV as a whole enjoys slight positive correlation with writing quality, among which PV of change of state and PV of functioning is of the highest correlation with writing quality. Third, the author continues to seek how exactly PV influences the writing quality in detail by examining the top 10 compositions and finds out that PV serves as supporting details in writing, mainly used to explain and expanding concepts and help clarify ideas, which are indispensable to good writings and of significance for EFL teaching and learning. |
PDF Full Text Request