Spoken-Like Features In The Academic Writings Of Advanced Chinese Learners Of English

Vocabulary is an indispensable element for language learning and teaching. Researchin vocabulary mainly focuses on the academic vocabulary used in the academic writings.Little is known about the spoken-like features in the learners’ academic writings. Thepresent study is undertaken to investigate the spoken-like features in Chinese Master ofArts (MA) theses, doctoral dissertations and journal papers.The contrastive interlanguage analysis approach is employed in this study. Sixcorpora are compiled which are the MA theses corpora, the doctoral dissertations corpora,and the journal papers corpora by Chinese advanced learners of English and Englishnative speakers. Twenty four spoken-like lexical items identified by Paquot (2010) areselected for this study. They are proved to be overused in the academic writings oflearners from different L1backgrounds. The overuse of those24lexical items is definedas the spoken-like feature in this study.Results showed that there were spoken-like features in the academic writings ofadvanced Chinese learners of English. In their academic writings, the advanced Chineselearners of English tended to avoid personal opinions expression contained I, me or my,employing only one out of the four spoken-like lexical items identified by Paquot (2010).In introducing topics and ideas, the expressions I would like/want/am going to talk aboutand by the way did not exist in the academic writings of advanced Chinese learners ofEnglish. The spoken-like features in the academic writings of advanced Chinese learnersof Englishdecreased as learners’ L2proficiencydeveloped.This study has an effect on EFL learning and teaching in that it provides useful datafor EFL learning and teaching. Teachers should raise the learners’ awareness of registerand use authentic teaching materials. Future research is expected to expand the size andrange of the corpora to discover new features in the academic writings of Chineselearners and to shed more light on EFL learning and teaching.