| The present thesis reports an empirical study about the emotion words used by Chinese Learners of English. It explores the possible influences of four factors on the use of emotion words by CLE in their interlanguage. Those factors to be investigated are language proficiency, gender, extraversion and topic.The author briefly reviewed research in emotion in history, distinguished emotion from other terms such as affect and feeling, demonstrated the significance of making research into emotion from linguistic point of view, and emphasized the social functions of emotions. Then the author summarized research carried out by the leading figures in the very domain of emotion language, and introduced the four factors to be investigated, i.e., language proficiency, gender, extraversion and topic.The author went on to introduce the very experiment itself. Altogether, 93 undergraduates majoring in English from PLAUFL participated in this experiment. They were divided into two groups. The first group consisted of 42 freshmen, 31 males and 14 females. They were assumed to be of low proficiency level of the English language in this study. The other group, i.e., the group of high proficiency level, consisted of 51 senior students, 30 males and 21 females.Participants were first administered the Eysenck Personality Inventory that would be used to determine their degree of extraversion. According to the scores they got in the questionnaire, they were then divided into three groups, extravert, ambivert and introvert. After that, the researcher carried out the main experiment. In the first part of the experiment, the subjects were shown several pictures which had been collected from the Internet and designed to be emotion-arousing topics. Participants were asked to describe one picture that had impressed them most, and then tell the interviewer why it was the most impressive. In the second part of the experiment, the subjects were asked to make comments on a subject that they were interested in. The topics from which they could choose were some serious and neutral issues such as the Internet, environmental pollution and cheating on exams. Those topics were designed to be non-emotion-arousing ones. Conversations between the interviewer and the interviewees were recorded on the spot.In the phase of data collection, the author firstly calculated participants'scores in the questionnaire. Subjects who scored 3 or lower on the scale for Extraversion were labeled introverts; subjects who scored between 4 and 8 fell into the category of ambiverts; and students with a score from 9 to 12 were labeled extraverts. Recordings were then transcribed by the researcher into orthographical English. Then the researcher singled out words with emotion value by referring to the emotion word lists by some researchers in that field of study. Proportions of emotion word lemmas and word tokens to the total number of words produced by each participant were obtained through simple calculations. After that, the author processed the data, using the SPSS (10.0 version) software. The main analysis procedures are listed below:⑴The author worked out some descriptive statistics such as Mean and Standard Deviation of emotion word proportions to demonstrate a general picture of emotion words used by the participants.⑵The author conducted a series of independent samples T-tests in category of proficiency in order to see if there were significant differences between two groups of low and high proficiency level in their use of emotion words.⑶The author carried out a series of independent samples T-tests in category of gender in order to see if there were significant differences between male and female L2 learners in their use of emotion words.⑷The author used ANOVA tests to see if there were significant differences among participants from three groups of extravert, ambivert and introvert in their use of emotion words.⑸The author conducted two paired samples T-tests in order to see if the differences caused by different types of topics were significant or not.In light of the results of the above-mentioned statistical analyses, the author reached the following conclusions:⑴There were no significant differences between two groups of low and high proficiency levels in their use of emotion words.⑵There were significant differences between male and female participants in the use of emotion words in their IL. Female participants used a wider range of emotion words and used emotion words in larger numbers.⑶The results of the analyses demonstrated that extraversion played a significant role in the range and number of emotion vocabulary. Participants with higher degrees of extraversion produced a wider range of emotion words and used emotion words in larger numbers.⑷Different topics led to significant differences in the use of emotion word lemmas and word tokens by CLE in their IL.Based on the results, it was emphasized that emotion plays an important role in L2 learning process, and some suggestions were made to improve the ESL teaching in China.There are six chapters in this thesis. The first chapter starts with a brief introduction to the origin and aim of this research, method used in it and a general design of this thesis. In the second chapter, the history of research in emotion, distinctions between emotion and some other related terms, social functions of emotion and various studies on emotion language are presented. The third chapter introduces four factors to be investigated, i.e., language proficiency, gender, extraversion and topic. Part four provides a detailed description of the present study, including preparations for the experiment, research questions and hypotheses, instruments and material, research procedure, and data collection. Data analyses and results of the present study are reported in the fifth chapter. Chapter six offers a summary of major findings of this research, points out its limitations and makes some suggestions for further study in this field in the future.
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