A Contrastive Study On Lexical Chunks In Ma Theses In Applied Linguistics Between Chinese And Native Masters

As corpus linguistics develops in depth,the study of lexical chunks has been the focus of researchers.Lexical chunks,as the most important constituents of discourse,act an important role in language acquisition and application.Also,as one of the most important ways of academic exchange,the quality of academic writing plays a significant part in researchers' academic achievement.But as the key factor influencing the quality of academic writings,the use of lexical chunks seems to present considerable challenges for the advanced English learners who are struggling to make their texts both fluent and authentic to readers in new communities.To date,most studies of lexical chunks of Chinese EFL learners focus on undergraduate students.However,in China,the postgraduates majoring in English,who can be regarded as the representatives of advanced EFL learners and the main groups of academic writings in English in China,are not paid much attention to as far as I know.On the basis of two self-built corpora,the researcher conducts a comparative analysis of Chinese and native masters' general distributions of lexical chunks in the two corpora,discusses the structural and functional differences of four-word lexical chunks in the two corpora and introductions with the method of combining the software antconc 3.2.1 and manual filtering.Afterwards,the features of lexical chunks used by Chinese advanced EFL in the field of applied linguistics are summarized.Statistically,the differences of lexical chunks used in Chinese and native masters' theses are displayed as follows: First,the quantity of short lexical chunks(three-word and four-word)applied by Chinese masters is larger than that of native masters,however,the standard TTR is not so high;while for long lexical chunks(five-word and six-word),both the quantity and the standard TTR are larger.Second,in terms of structure,the nominal and pronominal lexical chunks are applied more frequently by Chinese masters than that by native ones,whereas,the verbal and the prepositional lexical chunks are applied less;as for function,text-oriented lexical chunks are under-used by Chinese masters compared to the native ones.Third,the lexical chunks in introductions of CPTC and NPTC have the same structural features with that in the two whole corpora roughly,except that the two structures It+“be”+ adj and Pron/NP + “be” never occur in introduction of CPTC,adv clause structure never occurs in introduction of NPTC;functionally,in introduction of CPTC,both text-oriented and participant-oriented lexical chunks are under-used by Chinese masters compared to the native ones.This paper aims to enrich the research achievements about lexical chunks through explaining and analyzing the statistical data.The study also shows some enlightenment for EAP teaching and learning and provides advice for academic writing in the discipline of applied linguistics.Finally,this study comes to an objective analysis of its limitations and provides some advice for the future research based on the previous findings and discussion.