A Comparative Analysis Of Chinese English Major Students’and English Native Speakers’ Writings

English writing, as a productive and active skill, is of vital importance in English language acquisition. Based on the corpora of WECCL and LOCNESS, the present study adopts the method of Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and makes a multi-dimensional comparison on writing in terms of lexical and syntactic level between Chinese English major students and English native speakers. With the data collected and processed by AntConc, Foxpro and SPSS, the main research results are concluded as follows:Firstly, from the perspective of lexical features, English native speakers use richer vocabularies than Chinese English major students with respect to the type-token ratio. Furthermore, there are significant differences on different word lengths and word classes between Chinese English major students and English native speakers. Chinese English major students significantly overuse4-letter words,12-letter words and13-letter words, but underuse3-letter words and10-letter words. Compared with English native speakers, Chinese English major students significantly overuse pronouns, adverbs and verbs.Secondly, from the perspective of sentence structures, Chinese English major students significantly overuse simple sentences. English native speakers use diverse kinds of subordinate clauses. Chinese English major students significantly underuse attributive clauses and significantly overuse adverbial clauses, especially condition adverbial clauses. English native speakers use more time adverbial clauses. In compound sentences, Chinese English major students tend to use and, while English native speakers are likely to use but in writings. On sentence tenses and voices, Chinese English major students significantly overuse simple present tense and active voice. Results of this research show the oral style features of Chinese English major students’ compositions. Negative transfer and process of second language acquisition contribute to the differences of lexical features and sentence patterns in writings.