An Comparative Analysis On The Linguistic Features Of Compositions In Written Chinese Of Domestic And Thai And Indonesian Students

This paper investigated the differences in the Chinese linguistic features between the Thai and Indonesian students' compositions from the Advanced Chinese Writing course and native Chinese students'composi tions.This paper also puts forward some suggestions for the Chinese Writing course for foreign students based on representations from the Thai and Indonesian students.For this study,narrative compositions(105),argumentative composit:ions(104),and practical writing(66)for Thai and Indonesian students have been selected as the sample corpus.An equal number of native Chinese students' narrative,argumentative,and practical writing have been selected as the contrast corpus.A total of 6 contrastive groups(a total of 12 sub corpora)were established between:(1)Chinese ancd Thai students' narrative compositions;(2)Chinese and Indonesian students'narrative compositions;(3)Chinese and Thai students' argumentative compositions;(4)Chinese and Indonesian students' argumentative compositions;(5)Chinese and Thai students' practical writing;(6)Chinese and Indonesian students' practical writing.This study has compiled 4 overall categories of the corpus and 104 Chinese linguistic features.By means of text analysis tools and computer programming,the normalized frequency(frequency per one hundred words)of linguistic features in each subcorpus was counted individually.According to the sample size of each contrastive group,the Independent sample T test(n? 30)or Mann-Whitney U test(n<30)was used to examine whether the Chinese linguistic features' frequency in each contrastive group had significant differences.Then,based on the resul ts of the quantitative analysis,qualitative analysis was used to investigate the specific expres,sion forms of the linguistic features in the foreign students' compositions.Finally,the generality and characteristics in Chinese writing of the Thai and Indonesian students were summarized.The results indicated that there is a noticeable gap between the Thai and Indonesian students,and the native Chinese speakers in written Chinese.For example,there were problems such as a lack of vocabulary and lexical diversity,writing,and linguistic features usage errors,etc.Thai and Indonesian students had similarities and differences in writing Chinese compositions,but generally Indonesian students were better at Chinese writing than Thai students.Based on these discoveries,this paper puts forward some suggestions for the Chinese Writing course for foreign students.