An MD/MF Analysis Of Written Texts Produced By Senior Three Students Of PuTian

For more than thirty years,little research has been done on register variation in Chinese middle school students' written English.Based on the multi-dimensional and multi-feature(MD / MF)analysis(Biber,1988),this thesis chose narrative essays written by American university students and British university students(about 230,000 words)from LOCNESS as reference corpus,and the narrative essays written by senior three students from 6 schools in Putian with a total of 1800 articles and about 250,000 words as the target corpus.Using MAT v 1.0(multidimensional analysis tagger v 1.0,by Nini 2015)software and an independent t-test in SPSS Statistics,the multi-dimensional and multi-feature analysis of students' narrative essays was conducted.This study found:1.In Involved /Informational Production dimension,the dimension scores of the following schools in Putian are positive when compared that of LOCNESS(-0.69).They are1.18 of Putian No.1 Middle School,9.45 of Putian No.5 Middle School,11.4 of Zhuoying Middle School,4.27 of Zheli Middle School,13.57 of Putian No.3 Middle School(13.57)and 11.0 of Xianyou Modern Middle School.Students in Putian vary significantly from the native speakers in 8 linguistic features(P<0.05): FPP1(0.041),FPP2(0.039),WHQU(0.033),WHCL(0.044),DPAR(0.046),CONT(0.027),AMP(0.046),and CAUS(0.024).2.In Narrative / Non-narrative Concerns dimension,dimension scores of the six schools are all negative.Putian No.1 Middle School(-2.96)is closest to LOCNESS(-1.14).The other five schools are: Putian No.5 Middle School(-4.14),Zhuoying Middle School(-4.26),Zheli Middle School(-3.74),Putian No.3 Middle School(-4.92)and Xianyou Modern Middle School(-3.91).Students in Putian vary significantly from the native speakers in 2 linguistic features(P<0.05):PEAS(0.044)and FPP3(0.035).3.In Explicit /Situation-Dependent Reference dimension,dimension scores of the six schools are all positive,but there is a certain distance from LOCNESS(5.45)compared with Putian No.1 Middle School(2.15),Putian No.5 Middle School(2.76),Zhuoying Middle School(2.31),Zheli Middle School(2.86),Putian No.3 Middle School(1.57)and XianyouModern Middle School(1.63).Students in Putian vary significantly from the native speakers in 2 linguistic features(P<0.05):NOMZ(0.034)and PLACE(0.049).4.In Overt Expression of Persuasion dimension,the scores of the six schools are higher than LOCNESS(1.194)compared with Putian No.1 Middle School(3.60),Putian No.5Middle School(7.78),Zhuoying Middle School(5.47),Zheli Middle School(5.05),Putian No.3 Middle School(5.06)and Xianyou Modern Middle School(4.19).Students in Putian vary significantly from the native speakers in 2 linguistic features(P<0.05):SPAU(0.031)and NEMD(0.025).5.In Absract/ Non-Abstrct Information dimension,the score of Putian No.1 Middle School(0.16)is closest to LOCNESS(4.39).The other five schools are: Putian No.5 Middle School(-1.07),Zhuoying Middle School(-1.31),Zheli Middle School(-0.51),Putian No.3Middle School(-2.36)and Xianyou Modern Middle School(-2.24).Students in Putian vary significantly from the native speakers in 2 linguistic features(P<0.05): CONJ(0.036)and PASS(0.043).The above findings indicate:1.When compared with native speakers,senior three students in Putian have a strong interactivity in their writing,with a serious colloquial tendency,and cannot clearly distinguish between written and colloquial styles and distinguish the register features between written English and spoken English.They tend to use simple sentences,fail to change tense properly in essays and target the right references,and show poor performance in narration.Their writing are strongly persuasive because of the overuse of modal verbs.And they are not good at using passive to weaken the subject.Overall,their essays are poor in abstraction and professionalism.2.In terms of inter-school differences,Putian No.1 Middle School is the closest to LOCNESS.Compared with the Third-level schools,students from First-level and Second-level schools have better performance in Involved /Informational Production dimension,Explicit /Situation-Dependent Reference dimension and Abstract/ Non-Abstract Information dimension,but they do not show obvious differences in five dimensions.Based on the above research results,we propose that teachers should develop students' register awareness,guide students to distinguish between spoken and written registers,strengthen the use of vocabulary in writing and the use of long and difficult sentences,attachgreat importance to the matching between text and register and construct communication and interpersonal relationships by writing and focusing on textual language features.