A Corpus-Based Study Of Chinese Students Of English Majors' Use Of Stance Adverbials In Their Oral Production

Stance is an important aspect of language. When conveying propositional meanings, people also inevitably express their stance, that is, their attitudes, feelings or value judgments. A lot of studies on the use of stance adverbials between English learners with different cultural backgrounds have been done, especially the differences between native-speakers and non-native speakers, between different genders, but few touch upon the characteristics of using stance adverbials among different proficiency levels of English majors. Therefore, the researchers attempts to make a detailed study of the similarities and differences between higher and lower English majors to pave the way for further studies.The sample corpus used in the present research is taken from Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL) which is a sub-corpus of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL) and the native spoken corpora British National Corpus (BNC). By employing Biber's classification of stance adverbials in the present research, the researcher calculates the normalized frequency of stance adverbials with the help of the lexical analysis tool AntConc3.2.1 to find out the characteristics of using stance adverbials between English learners and native speakers; Based on the students'rank, the researcher chooses the corpus in which the students'rank is top 3 as the higher level of English majors (totally 30 samples) while the corpus in which students'rank is about 25-35 as the lower level of English majors(totally 30 samples). Meanwhile, the 60 samples will be divided into three different tasks, that is, task A (retelling a story), task B (Monologue) and task C (Role play). Then the researcher aims to explore whether the differences between the higher and lower level of English majors are significant by using the tool of Log-likelihood in terms of overall frequency, variety and different tasks. Finally Pearson Correlation Tests are conducted between the use of stance adverbial and oral performance. The research results have showed that:1) First, there are significant differences between English majors and native speakers in terms of frequency and types in their use of stance adverbials. Native English speakers tend to use fewer stance adverbials in terms of frequencies while they use more types of stance adverbials than English majors do. Meanwhile English majors are more likely to overuse and also underuse some stance adverbials which may frequently appear in the oral language of native speakers.2) Obvious differences exist between higher and lower level of English majors in terms of frequency and types of stance adverbials are the main differences. Compared with the lower level of English majors, the higher level of English Majors use more stance adverbials in terms of number and type. However, there are also some similarities between the two groups. Students of both groups prefer using the first type of stance adverbial—epistemic stance adverbials. Moreover, there is an increasing tendency for students of both groups in the use of stance adverbials from tasks 1 to task II and to task III.3) The use of stance adverbials is not correlated with oral performance,The present study not only sheds some light on the English language learning and correctly using of stance adverbials in spoken English for English learners, especially by English majors. It would also be of great help for teachers to identify some specific factors that influence students' oral performance and to make efforts to improve their teaching of oral English. The corpus-based approach could provide references for the teaching and learning of oral English at home.