A Corpus-based Study On The Linguistic Features Of The Narrative Essays By Junior High School Students

In junior high schools,practical writing is often the focus of writing class while narrative essay writing is generally ignored.Recently,however,the importance of narrative writing after reading is enhanced with the increasing need to fulfill the continuation writing task in the college entrance examination,as is required and practiced in many provinces in China.The ability of narrative essay writing has come to the center of attention in the teaching of English writing in compulsory education.The study of the linguistic features and tendencies of development of narrative essay can contribute to the promotion of students’ narrative essay writing abilities.With the development of corpus technology,research on linguistic features has become more and more mature.This study has built a small corpus of English narrative essays in junior high schools.With the help of corpus analysis tools such as Coh-Metrix3.0 and Word Smith8.0,this study attempts to describe the linguistic features,development tendencies and the correlation between linguistic features and the textual qualities in order to provide effective suggestions for the improvement of English narrative essay pedagogy in junior high schools.This study collected 270 narrative essays in standardized tests from three grades in 14 junior high schools in XM city,with 90 writings from each grade.Through a corpus-based analysis of the writing texts,this study attempts to address the following three questions:(1)What are the differences in the linguistic features of English narrative texts in different grades?(2)What are the differences in the linguistic features between high-quality and low-quality English narrative texts?(3)What is the correlation between linguistic features and the quality of English narrative essay?This study has adopted a corpus-based approach to describe the linguistic features of English narrative texts with different qualities in different grades from the following four dimensions:descriptive statistics,lexical features,syntactic features,and cohesive features.The preliminary findings show that:(1)The proportion of complex vocabulary,complex sentential patterns and conjunctions in English narrative texts in junior high schools increase with grades.It is the lowest in the seventh grade.But it sees a sharp increase in the eighth grade and a slow increase in the ninth grade.The lexical richness also shows a slight and gentle upward trend with the increase of grades.(2)English narratives of different qualities show different linguistic features.The lowquality narrative essays often have the following characteristics: the words are more concrete and less diversified,and the lexical complexity is low;in the use of syntax,syntactic structures such as infinitives,gerund phrases,and agentless passive voice density are not used frequently;in terms of cohesion,the frequency of the use of temporal conjunctions and additional conjunctions is not high;the overlapping rate of content words is high,and the similarity of sentence meaning is high.In contrast,high-quality narrative essays show the opposite tendencies in the use of lexicon,syntactical structures and cohesive devices.(3)There is a significant correlation between the quality of English narrative essay and the four descriptive dimensions.In the four dimensions,the features that show a significant positive correlation with text quality are manifested in the following four aspects: the number of words and sentences,lexical complexity,adverbial phrases,gerund phrases,prepositional phrases,the use ratio of agentless passive voice and syntactic complexity,and the ratio of various conjunctions such as temporal and additional conjunctions.The features that are significantly negatively correlated with the textual quality are manifested in the familiarity,concreteness and imagability of content words,and the hypernym and hyponym relations for nouns and verbs in the lexical dimension,the minimum distance between words and the overlapping ratio of content words and sentential similarity.It is observed that the linguistic features of English narrative essays in junior high schools increase sharply first in the 8th grade and then fairly slowly in the 9th grade.It reveals that students in the ninth grade have not significantly improved their levels of vocabulary,syntax and cohesion in their English narrative essays.There is also a significant correlation between writing qualities and linguistic features.The research findings have important implications for the teaching of narrative essay in junior high schools:(1)An increase of the amount of training in English narrative essay is required and a deeper understanding of the linguistic features of the current English narrative essays in junior high schools is needed to improve the quality of narrative essay in the9 th grade.Teachers should provide students with more corpus support and effective guidance in the teaching of English narrative essay;(2)Teachers should guide students to improve the linguistic features of low-quality writings by showing the contrastive features of high-quality writings and encourage students to compare and improve their own writings;(3)The evaluation criteria for the quality of English narrative essays should be optimized.Teachers can formulate a targeted evaluation scale for English narrative essays based on the linguistic features that are significantly related to the writing qualities in the four dimensions,which can provide an effective reference for the evaluation of English narrative essays.Based on a corpus-based analysis of the linguistic features of English narrative essays in junior high schools from four dimensions,this study is helpful to English teachers in the mastery of the linguistic features and changing tendencies of English narrative essays.It is also beneficial to second linguistic learners in the understanding of the differences in linguistic features between high-quality and low-quality narrative essays in the improvement of the quality of English narrative essays.Furthermore,the research findings also have important implications for the practical teaching and evaluation of English narrative essays in junior high school.