A Corpus-based Study On The Use Of Downtoners In The Dissertations And Journal Papers Of Chinese EFL Learners

Downtoners refer to the subjuncts that are used to lower the semantic category ofdegree. Downtoners play an important role in language learning and teaching. Manyscholars have studied the use and collocations of downtoners in native speakerlearners and Chinese EFL students’ argumentative writing or oral production. Theirresults showed that there are different features between native speakers and ChineseEFL learners in the use of downtoners and range of downtoner collocations. Thispaper reports a study on the use of downtoners and downtoner collocations in the MAtheses, doctoral dissertations and journal papers of Chinese EFL learners.The present study is performed by making a contrastive analysis on the use andcollocations of downtoners between Chinese EFL learners and native speakerslearners based on six corpora. Three corpora of MA theses, doctoral dissertations andjournal papers by Chinese EFL learners and three control corpora of MA theses,doctoral dissertations and journal papers by native speaker learners were compiledand used for the analyses. Seventeen downtoners are selected to be the foci of interestin the present study. Statistical tool SPSS17is employed to conduct the statisticalanalysis. Antconc3.2.4is also used to compute the collocations of the downtoners.Results showed that the overall number of downtoners used by the native speakerlearners and Chinese EFL learners were comparable. However, there are significantdifferences between native speakers and Chinese EFL learners in the use and range ofcollocations. Chinese EFL learners overused rather, enough, almost and relatively intheir academic writing. In addition, Chinese EFL learners have a tendency to usemore donwonter collocations than their native learners’ counterparts. They are notcompletely aware of the semantic meaning of the collocation items. And they usedowntoner collocations more freely and randomly than the native speaker learners. The findings indicate that Chinese EFL learners used some of the downotnercollocation the same way as the native speaker learners in their academic writing.However they do overuse and underuse some downonter collocations because theyare influenced by their lexical insufficiency and their mother tongue. The thesis alsodiscussed pedagogical implications in language learning and teaching.