A Study Of Syntactic Features Of English Majors’ Writing—A Corpus Based Method

With the development of corpus linguistics, syntactic features play a more and more important role in the research of ESL writing, which are deemed to have a prominent effect on the quality of writing. Studies have been carried out on different types of essays among L2 learners of various ages providing insight into ESL teaching and learning. Meanwhile, the current studies on syntactic features are not comprehensive enough, with particular concepts ambiguous and misleading. The current study focuses on three syntactic features of Chinese English majors, the basic sentence structures, the subject types, and the use of subordinate clauses as indices of the writing quality.The research materials consist of 120 sample essays(30 from each grade) collected from Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners(WECCL), and 30 from British A-level argumentative essays in LOCNESS for comparison. All the essays are tagged with information about the three kinds of syntactic features. The frequency of each structure gets retrieved in Antconc, and the results are discussed to answer the following three questions: 1) What are the syntactic features of English writing composed by English majors? 2) What are the syntactic differences between English majors of different grades? 3) What are the differences between English majors in China and native English learners? The data collected are analyzed through SPSS 19.0 for Independent Samples T Test and One-Way ANOVA. The major findings are as follows: 1) About the basic sentence structures used, Chinese English majors tend to use more SVO structures, while native learners use more SVC structures. 2) About the subject types, Chinese English majors tend to use more pronoun subjects, while native learners use more noun subjects. 3) About the subordinate clauses, Chinese English majors tend to use more object clauses, while native learners use more predicative clauses. 4) On the three features, Chinese English majors show no obvious developing trend across 4 different grades.The above findings are applicable for ESL teaching and learning, as well as for ESL research. Teachers should make their students clear about the distinctions in syntactic features between Chinese learners and native learners. Through practice and error analysis, students should be encouraged to employ comparatively more SVC structure, noun subjects and predicative clauses for more native-like expressions. ESL researchers need to clarify the relationships between syntactic features and writing quality by means of various tests and empirical studies and set up standards for evaluating essays in terms of syntactic features.