A Corpus-based Study Of China's Tertiary Vocational College Students'writingability Of English Business Enquiry Letters

According to the committee of Practical English Test for Colleges, China's tertiary vocational colleges and students account for more than fifty percent of those of China's higher education. Therefore, tertiary vocational education has drawn increasing attention from educators and researchers. However, not enough attention has been given to the study of tertiary vocational college learners'English proficiency. Little research has been conducted of these learners'ability of writing English business letters.The current study aims to explore tertiary vocational college learners'writing ability of English business enquiry letters by a corpus-based approach. Six hundred and eight compositions of Chinese students are extracted as Chinese learners'language database from Practical English Test for Colleges. The Native English speakers'corpus in this research (Corpus M 1) is built by the researcher. Chinese learners'use of moves, formulaic language and a high frequency collocation are analyzed and compared with those of native English speakers. The research findings indicate that Chinese learners'use of moves, formulaic language and collocates of a high frequent verb-noun collocation are significantly different from those of native English speakers. One important reason for these differences is the negative language transfer. Chinese learners should make efforts to improve their writing ability in these three aspects.The findings of this study are of significance to understand the actual ability of Chinese tertiary vocational college learners to write English business letters and the problems in their writing as well. This study provides Chinese learners with a framework of English business enquiry letters and also provides English teachers with some suggestions on teaching English writing.