A Corpus-based Contrastive Study Of English Journal Articles In China And Britain

Reading English journal articles has been an important way for English learners to improve their language proficiency. Studies have been conducted on the features of journalistic language are not only helpful in better understanding the essentials of this special genre, but also conducive to the standardization of journalistic language. Built on former achievements in this respect, the current paper goes forward to draw on corpus linguistics, attempting to identify the similarities and differences in rule-governing and language choice in English journals written by native speakers of Chinese and those of English.Based on corpus compilation principles, such as representativeness and balance in terms of size and genre of the resource data, two self-established corpora consisting of articles from The Economist written by native speakers of English and these from Beijing Review written by native speakers of Chinese are processed with corpus software in order to answer the following questions:(1) What are the differences of journalistic language in English journal articles published in China and Britain?(2) What could be the possible causes of such differences? More detailed analysis is made to examine lexical and stylistic features of journalistic language in two different cultural settings as well as the possible cultural factors revealed in the corpora. Findings are summarized and the pedagogical implications of current study and directions for further research are addressed. It is hoped that contrastive analysis of journalistic English would raise EFL learners'awareness of language complexity and facilitate EFL teaching and learning in China.