Lexical Characteristics Of Chinese EFL Learners' Spoken English

This study, based on the corpus of SECCL, WECCL, BNCS and BNCW, aims at analyzing the lexical characteristics of Chinese EFL learners' spoken English by comparing native spoken and written English with Chinese EFL learners' spoken and written English, and by investigating the following aspects of spoken vocabulary: vocabulary size, lexical coverage rate, lexical density, vocabulary increase rate, high frequency words, hapax legomena, word length, inserts, informal words, contractions, and the words over-used in Chinese EFL learners' spoken English.The result of the present study shows that: (1) the vocabulary sizes are: 10,783 (BNCS), 41,426 (BNCW), 5,497 (SECCL) and 8,605 (WECCL); (2) the lexical density are: 0.0105 (BNCS), 0.0414 (BNCW), 0.0038 (SECCL) and 0.0085 (WECCL); (3) the mean word length are: 6.48 (BNCS), 7.41 (BNCW), 6.36 (SECCL) and 7.37 (WECCL); (4) the vocabulary increase curve of BNCW is much higher than that of BNCS while the vocabulary increase curve of SECCL and WECCL are almost the same in height.After a systematic study, the following conclusions are drawn: firstly, compared with the striking differences between native spoken and written English, the differences between Chinese EFL learners' spoken and written English are rather slight. Secondly, in Chinese EFL learners' spoken English, 800 words can cover 95% of the total tokens while in native spoken English 3,000 words can reach the coverage rate of 95%. Thirdly, there are considerable differences in the use of inserts, contractions and informal words between Chinese EFL learners' spoken English and native spoken English. Fourthly, there are a number of overgeneralized words in Chinese EFL learners' spoken English, most of them are deviant structure of past tense.