An Analysis On Some Linguistic Features Of High-and Low-score TEM-8Writings

Contemporary social life and the increasing globalization of economic activities make English an important bridge between China and the whole world. Also, it has become a basic civic literacy essential.Writing is an important skill for EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners. The written production by EFL learners can be systematically studied so as to find out the characteristics of the interlanguage of foreign language learners. Writing in English is regarded as a weak point in college English teaching in China. Among the four basic skills of college English learning, writing may be viewed as the hardest for learners to acquire, for it is a comprehensive reflection of the whole language study and application skills. In English teaching, both teachers and students have been devoting themselves a lot to English writing course. Unfortunately, the results prove unsatisfactory. However, in previous TEM-8writings there are excellent ones with17,18points (full marks:20points). What are the differences between high-and low-score TEM-8writings? And what linguistic features of interlanguage are exposed? All of these are worth paying attention to by researchers and English teachers.At present, a large number of researches are being conducted on interlanguage in our country, but most of them aim at comparing the EFL learners with the native speakers. Studies on linguistic features of writings by EFL learners at different levels are rare. Based on the linguistic features of the writings of the English native speakers, this thesis, adopting a corpus-based analysis method, compares the linguistic features of high-score TEM-8writings (HSW) with those of low-score TEM-8writings (LSW). It aims to find out the similarities and differences between them, and explore the possible reasons leading to the differences. At the lexical level, there are three aspects to be dealt with:mean word length, standardized type/token ratio and spelling errors. At the grammatical level, there are four points to be dealt with:the number of sentences, average sentence length and its standard deviation, proportion of complex sentences and modal sequences. In addition, the author makes a tentative study on the comparison of lexical chunks in both the HSW corpus and the LSW corpus. The results of the research summarize some similarities and differences between high-and low-score TEM-8writings. After the comparison of these two corpora, the author puts forward some suggestions for future teaching and learning.