A Corpus-based Study On Chinese EFL Learners’ Register Awareness Of Spoken And Written English

The term register has been used to refer to variations according to use of language,namely, the functional varieties, and here, it mainly refers to spoken and writtenregisters in terms of the mode. EFL learners’ register awareness, in this regard, is theirawareness of variations across speech and writing as well as appropriate language useon different occasions. It is common that Chinese EFL learners always lack someregister awareness and have some English communication problems reckless of theirmany years’ English learning. Despite the fact that they have accumulated muchvocabulary and are familiar with grammar, in the eyes of native speakers, their writtenEnglish seems not so formal, resembling “write speaking”, and their spoken Englishsounds not so authentic and natural, resembling “reciting textbooks”. Therefore, it isnecessary to study the current situation of Chinese EFL learners’ register awareness andanalyze the possible causes of the current situation of their register awareness, in thehope of providing some possible implications for EFL teaching in China, so as toimprove Chinese English learners’ English communicative competence and theappropriateness of their English output.The emergence and development of Corpus Linguistics has greatly contributed tothe relevant study, and through literature review it is discovered that previous studies onlearners’ register awareness mainly focus on EFL learners’ written English, few hastouched on their spoken English, still less both their written and spoken English. Thesize of English learners’ language material chosen by some previous studies is too smallto be representative of the overall EFL learners’ English output. What’ more, previousstudies mainly choose those register sensitive linguistic features at the lexical level asthe research parameters, such as lexical density, reader/writer visibility, and lexicalvariation. However, the typical linguistic features distinguishing speech and writing arefar more than what has been discussed above, and hence it is not comprehensive enoughto limit the study to the lexical perspective. Many existing studies, apart from what hasbeen discussed above, lack a dynamic perspective on learners’ register awareness,merely concentrating on a static perspective. This study, accordingly, based on theresearch findings of Chafe (1982) and Biber (1988), will take a longitudinal and comprehensive perspective to the oral and written production of Chinese EFL learners,and focus on the current situation of Chinese EFL learners’ register awareness and thedevelopmental trend of their register awareness, choosing typical linguistic featuresranging from phonological to lexical level, from phrasal to syntactic level as themeasurement parameters. This study aims to discover:1) Compared with native speakers, do Chinese EFL learners have obvious registerawareness of spoken and written English? What is the current situation of their registerawareness of spoken and written English?2) Is there a developmental trend in Chinese EFL learners’ register awareness ofspoken and written English, as their learning time increases?3) If there is a developmental trend in Chinese EFL learners’ register awareness,what characteristics are there in such trend?This study, employing the Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis as the researchmethod, chose learners’ English material with about130,000running words fromSpoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners2.0(SWECCL2.0Edition).The reference native speakers’ written material is the argumentative essays totalingaround70,000words from Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS), andthe native speakers’ spoken material comes from The Michigan Corpus of AcademicSpoken English (MICASE), totaling about60,000words. According to Biber and Chafe,the typical written and spoken linguistic features were chosen as the measurementparameters, and Wordsmith, Antconc were used to retrieve these parameters to obtaintheir normalized frequencies. The final step was data analysis and discussion with thehelp of SPSS. Through investigation it is found that:1) Compared with native speakers, Chinese EFL learners’ register awareness, thatis, the awareness of variations across speech and writing as well as appropriatelanguage use on different occasions is quite weak and vague. Their spoken and writtenEnglish demonstrate little difference, thus resulting in the overlapping and mixture ofthe two. When compared with their native counterparts, their written output ischaracterized by less written style but more degree of oralness, and their spoken output displays less degree of oralness but more degree of written style.2) As their learning time increases, there appears the developmental trend ofChinese learners’ register awareness.3) Such kind of developmental trend is just for learners’ register awareness ofwritten English, their written output being characterized by a higher degree of writtenstyle and lower tendency of oralness. EFL learners’ register awareness of spokenEnglish, by contrast, shows no trend of development, they uttering English with lowerdegree of oralness but higher written tendency. This reflects that their output, to somedegree, is a sort of reciting grounded on books and formal classroom teaching.The following pedagogical implications, based on the research results, are putforward: firstly, EFL teaching in China ought to lay emphasis on the cultivation oflearners’ communicative competence and their register awareness, as well as theappropriateness of learners’ English production. The real purpose of Englishcommunication is supposed to be taken into consideration in Chinese EFL teaching, soas to manifest itself in teaching objective, teaching materials, teaching method, and theevaluation of students’ performance, and so on. In this way, students will improve theirregister awareness. Secondly, the authentic and natural use of English should beemphasized. EFL teachers can create some authentic and natural communicationcontexts, some imitations of the authentic and natural communication contexts, at least.In this way, students can generate some real and urgent needs for communication andsatisfaction of communication, thus they can strengthen their register awareness.Thirdly, English teachers can also make use of the multi-modal teaching environmentcreated by multi-media as well as large corpora, so as to enable English learners to haveopportunities to touch conversation in daily life and formal written English, and observethe English use in natural and authentic contexts. Finally, students themselves aresupposed to emphasize the appropriateness and effectiveness of their Englishproduction, as well as the cultivation of register awareness, rather than merely seekingto score well in examinations.