A Corpus-based Study On The Tendency Of Informality In English Writing By Chinese Students

On the basis of formal and informal style, spoken and written language in style theory, the thesis aims to study the tendency of informality in English writing by Chinese students by comparing English learners’corpus and native speakers’. Criteria employed are writer/reader visibility and2000most frequent words which can represent the degree of informality. Compositions are obtained from two corpora: Chinese Learners English Corpus (CLEC) and Brown Corpus of Standard American English (Brown). As a quantitative research, all the compositions written by students of three English levels in CLEC will be studied in the thesis. These students include senior high school students, non-English majors and English majors. Brown corpus is chosen as the comparative corpus in the study.With the increasing importance of English learning, many researches have been conducted on Chinese students’English leaning, most of which are confined to error analysis, such as spelling error, collocation error, misuse of certain verbs or prepositions. Author of the thesis focuses on a different problem that is the informal language adopted in Chinese students’formal writing based on style theory with the emphasis laid on features of formal and informal style, spoken and written language. Then data reflecting writer/reader visibility proposed by Petch-Tyson (1998) and2000most frequent words developed by Laufer&Nation are employed as the criteria of testing informality. Data will be retrieved in the two corpora and five sub-corpora in CLEC with the help of software Antconc3.1.302and VocabProfile Web VP (1.5). Then comparison analyses are made to indicate whether Chinese students have the tendency to employ informal language in their compositions analyzed through the informality difference between Chinese students’writing and Native Americans’. If so, will the tendency change with the improvement of Chinese students’ English proficiency?Research results show that Chinese students have the tendency to employ informal language with high level of informality compared with Native Americans’ writing. Words reflecting the writer/reader visibility in CLEC are nearly three times as many as those in Brown and the percentage of K1Words in CLEC is11.03%higher than that in Brown. In terms of K2Words, ratio difference in the two corpora is slight. Meanwhile the degree of informality decreases with the development of their English proficiency. Usually the informal language employed by senior high school students ranks the highest. In terms of writer/reader visibility, the falling rate of informality in English majors’writing is higher than non-English majors. As for K1Words in2000most frequent words, the case is contrary to the change in writer/reader visibility. The change speed of the informal language usage among students of different English proficiency is of disequilibrium. The informality tendency reduces with the development of students English proficiency on the whole.Main causes of the results can be summarized as follows:Chinese students lack chances to expose to authentic English context, for they are generally confined to the classroom to learn English mainly from the textbook which hinders them from acquiring the application of real English; most English teachers put more emphasis on word memorization and grammar but less emphasis on the actual use of a language as a whole that leads to improper instruction for students; students lack the awareness of style while writing to cause the confusion of spoken and written language in their compositions; students’English expressions cannot avoid the influence of Chinese thinking pattern to cause the negative transfer sometimes.Some implications for English writing provided by the results are as follows:writing reflects a comprehensive capacity of learning a language, which takes longer to be improved. Thus teachers should give encouragement for students’ progress. Meanwhile teachers and students need put emphasis on the importance of style in writing and distinguish between informal and formal style and between spoken and written language to adopt words and expressions with proper stylistic features.The study aims to help students be aware that expressions adopted in writing should be different from those in spoken language to learn the formal features of English writing. The author makes a suggestion that native speakers’compositions or native language corpora could be applied to English classes in China.