A Corpus-based Comparative Study On College Students' Written Chunks

Adopting the corpus linguistic approach, the present thesis intends first to explore the distribution, structural features and pragmatic functions of lexical chunks used by Chinese non-English major college students in writing, then to conduct a comparative study of the uses of chunks by these Chinese learners and their native peers.COLEC (College Learner English Corpus) and LOCNESS (Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) are taken as the data source for the study. All three- to six-word lexical chunks are extracted from the two corpora with the help of WordSmith Tools and manual filtering procedure. Following Altenberg's criterion (1998), according to their structures, all these chunks are classified into three broad categories: full clauses, clause constituents and incomplete phrases.Some formal features and pragmatic functions of the chunks are first figured out in CET compositions based on COLEC. The study finds that most chunks share the general characteristics of clear structure, transparent meaning and basically fixed form. Variations may occur in the inner structure of the chunks, which include lexical variations, simplification/extension, singular and plural forms, etc. After the formal analysis, some pragmatic functions that the chunks can serve in specific contexts are identified. Some of the most salient functions are informational function, emotional function, remarking function, moralizing function and organizing function.Based on statistics in the comparative analysis, lexical chunks are prevalent in English. They are frequently used by English learners and native speakers. Whether in COLEC or in LOCNESS, three-word chunks always occupy the largest proportion, and the number of chunks declines as the chunk length increases. What's more, in both COLEC and LOCNESS, among the three structural categories, clausal constituents come first in number in both corpora, followed by incomplete phrases, while complete clausal chunks the last.However, the using conditions of chunks by these EFL learners are found to be far from satisfactory. There exists a general overuse of the chunks by Chinese non-English majors and the difference is more significant with longer and highly recurrent chunks. Chinese college students also tend to underuse some lexical chunks in their compositions. The underlying factors for these deviations might be negative transfer of mother tongue, colloquial tendency, habitual thinking way and the misleading of traditional teaching approach etc. Based on the findings concerning Chinese non-English major learners'use of the chunks, suggestions to current English writing teaching and learning in China are provided.