| Language is an important tool in human’s daily communication. We not only uselanguage to transmit information and knowledge, but also rely on it to show ourfeelings, attitudes and assessment. In last decades, scholars at home and abroad haveinvestigated the evaluative language hidden in our language production under severaldifferent labels such as stance. Meanwhile, multi-word sequences have been studiedunder many different rubrics including lexical bundles for they have been consideredas the basic building blocks of our language. Stance Bundles, which carry the twofactors attracting many researchers are studied in this paper.This present study adopts the framework developed by Biber and his colleagues inthe investigation of lexical bundles and the expression of stance in university registers,and aims to find out what the differences in the use of stance bundles betweenChinese college English learners and the native speakers. Based on the analysis of thedifferences, it attempts to offer some suggestions for the teaching and learning inspoken English in Chinese colleges.Stance bundles are extracted from College Learners Spoken English Corpus(COLSEC) in the examination of the use of stance bundles by Chinese collegeEnglish learners, and the corpus data from British National Corpus (BNC) is used forreference in order to make a comparison between Chinese college English learnersand native speakers. The stance bundles found in COLSEC are categorized into10categories in order to specify the differences between Chinese college Englishlearners and the native speakers in expressing different stance meanings.The results show that Chinese college English learners have acquired the ability toexpress their feelings, attitudes and assessment by applying stance bundles in theirspeech. However, there is discrepancy between Chinese college English learners andthe native speakers. Overuse, underuse and misuse are pervasive in each category ofthe stance bundles in COLSEC. What’s more, stance bundles with repetition andnon-linguistic sounds are used much more frequently than that of the native speakers.Chinese college English learners also produce the stance bundles with pronunciationerrors which the native speakers are not assumed to produce. Possible causes of thedifferent use in stance bundles between Chinese college English Learners and thenative speakers are discussed in terms of L1transfer, communication strategies,interlanguage pragmatic failure, lack of L2input and test-related influence. |
