| "If we spoke as we write we should find no one to listen; and if we wrote as we speak we should find no one to read" (T. S. Eliot). However, it is observed that language produced by some advanced Chinese learners is lexically, syntactically, grammatically right, but sounds odd to native speakers. Their language is bookish and stereotype due to inappropriate use of register. It is not exactly the same as speech and writing produced by native speakers. Is it a universal problem that English produced by advanced Chinese learners has mixed features of speech and writing? Are there typical features of speech in their writing and obvious features of writing in their speech?It is hypothesized that English produced by advanced Chinese learners has mixed features of speech and writing, and there are typical features of speech in their writing and obvious features of writing in their speech.This thesis adopted corpus-based approach and made an interlanguage contrastive study. The corpus for studying advanced Chinese learner English is Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners, containing 2,000,000 words. This corpus contains two sub-corpora: Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learner, each including 1,000,000 words. Due to the limit of certain conditions, some data of native speaker English for comparison is quoted from related studies. The variations across speech and writing are multiple, however, because of limit of space and computer technology, only several variations mainly in lexical level are compared between speech and writing produced by advanced Chinese learner and native speaker. These variations are lexical variation, writer/ reader visibility, contrastive links of style orientation, and lexical frequency profile.Through the comparison of lexical richness, writer/reader visibility, contrastive links with style orientation, and lexical frequency profile between Chinese learner English and English produced by native speakers, it is concluded that through years of study, advanced Chinese English learners acquire some features of variations across speech and writing; however, these features in the speech and writing produced by them are not as distinctive as those in the speech and writing produced by native speakers. Speech produced by advanced Chinese learners is not the same as that produced by native speakers, mixed with some writing features. So it is the case with their writing, with some speech features in it. The advanced Chinese learner English seems to be a special language with mixed features of speech and writing.The following are the specific arrangements of the contents of this thesis.Chapter one is the literature review of studies on variations across speech and writing. There is no linguistic or situational characterization of speech and writing that is true of all spoken and written genres. It is necessary to propose the notion of typical speech and typical writing here first. Typical speech refers to face-to-face conversation and typical writing refers to argumentation. Many scholars made significant contribution to the study of variations across typical speech and typical writing. Before large corpora for language study were built, most of their studies were just based on several individual texts and conclusions drawn from those were objective. The establishment of large corpora makes a more complete and subjective view on variations across speech and writing available. In recent yeas, as a great number of large learner corpora have been established, more and more studies are focus on revealing the non-nativeness of advanced learners through comparing learner corpus and native corpus. Some European scholars revealed the phenomenon of genre diversification existing among European some English learners. Some applied linguist in China, such as Wen Qiufang, noticed that the problem of genre diversification also exists in speech and writing produced by Chinese learner. She made replication of European study based on large Chinese learner corpus to test this hypothesis. She found that there are features of speech in writings produced by advanced English learners. Wen Qiufang only studied the advanced English learners' writings and found that there were features of speech in the learners' writings. This thesis will study a large spoken corpus to find whether there are also written features in advanced Chinese learners' speeches. Besides, she just tested this hypothesis in terms of one or two variations across speech and writing. and the material collected by her is small scaled, with some are dozens of compositions together. This thesis will test this hypothesis in a more complete perspective based on large spoken and written corpus of advanced English learner.Chapter two is about research design and procedures. The texts selected for study are conversations and argumentation parts from Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners, which are separately representatives of typical speech and typical writing. The computing tools used in this thesis are mainly WordSmith and VocabProfile. Research method adopted in this thesis is interlanguage contrastive study. It is hypothesized that there are mix features in speech and writing produced by advanced Chinese learners. Parameters chosen are lexical variation, writer/ reader visibility, contrastive links of style orientation, and lexical frequency profile.Chapter three is on specific examination of the speech and writing produced by advanced Chinese learners in terms of lexical variation, writer / reader visibility, contrastive links of style orientation and lexical frequency profile. Token/type ratio, frequency of personal pronouns, pragmatic markers (such as I mean, you know), fuzzy reference, emphatic particles, difference co-efficiency of contrastive links, and proportion of words Chinese learners use at different frequency levels, are computed with Wordsmith and VocabProfile. Then the data is compared with that of native speaker to reveal the differences between advanced Chinese learner and native speaker in these aspects.In chapter four, the author attempts to analyze reasons behind this phenomenon and to provide implications of this study for English teaching and studying in China. The problem is assumed to be caused by limited vocabulary size, lack of systematic introduction on variations across speech and writing, and inappropriate proportion of speech and writing classes in teaching set-up. Some improvements need to be made in English teaching and studying in China. First of all, English teachers and students can make good use of various corpora to improve English teaching and studying. Secondly, some improvements need to be made in vocabulary acquisition. Thirdly, spoken lexis need to be attached more importance. Finally, advanced English learners need systematic learning of variations across speech and writing and of features of other registersBased on all the discussion above, this thesis comes to its conclusion in chapter five that mixed features do exist in speech and writing produced by advanced Chinese learners. There are not only spoken features in their writings, but also written features in their speeches. This interlanguage contrastive study of mixed features of speech and writing has significant implications for English teaching and learning in China.
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