A Contrastive Study On Type-Token Ratio In The Same Topic Compositions Of Sino-US College Students

During the past decades,TTR(Type-token ratio)has been the subject of a host of research studies at home and abroad since it plays an effective and essential role in evaluating lexical diversity within a text.A multitude of relevant studies on it mainly focus on comparing the statistical results of TTR between native speakers and L2 learners or exploring the type frequency and token frequency of a certain linguistic form.However,quite rarely have researchers addressed the TTR in depth through investigating the lexical distribution and features of TTR by parts of speech and seeking potential linguistic and non linguistic factors concerning TTR comprehensively.Against the above research background,the present study,within the usage based model of language,taking advantage of the same topic compositions from ICNALE corpus,attempts to(1)compare the overall TTR results of argumentative compositions written by American and Chinese college students,(2)examine the detailed results of TTR by part of speech and identify the commonly used types of words with significant difference and semantic distribution of tokens,and(3)explore linguistic and nonlinguistic factors affecting the result of TTR.Based on the data analysis,the results obtained are as follows.First of all,the statistical results show that native speakers do outperform Chinese English learners in terms of lexical diversity and textual fluency.Secondly,detailed results of TTR reveal that the significant differences between the native speakers and L2 learners lie in the usage of the following categories,namely,pronouns,prepositions,conjunctions,adverbs and verbs.And the commonly used types and semantic distribution of tokens of words with distinct TTR demonstrate that there are both quantitative and qualitative disparities between the two groups in the use of these word categories.For the commonly used types with significant difference,the author finds that Chinese students show a stronger tendency of repeating the same word types and overusing the key word of the topic,which contributes to the lack of variety of word types.With regard to the semantic distribution,the results demonstrate that in comparison with American college students,Chinese college students show an inferior ability of mastering those words with specific and concrete semantic meanings since they have a stronger desire of repeating those basic or general ones with which they are familiar.Besides,Chinese writers are less capable of using the words with multiple semantic elements especially the metaphorical meanings and a typical case is reflected in the usage of prepositions.And they tend to overuse the linking adverbs in their written texts.Through investigation,the disparity in the result of TTR is found to be attributed to the lexical repetition methods used in the compositions.Compared with Chinese English learners,native speakers are more skilled in employing various methods including lexical derivation or synonyms to avoid dull repetition and wordy written language.Aside from this,the results of TTR are also found to be closely related with other potential factors including sentence types and length,complex lexical expression,textual structures and effects of L1.The research findings can offer enlightening pedagogical implications for L2 writing teaching and learning.