A Multidimensional Contrastive Analysis Of The Linguistic Features Of Chineses-English Academic Writing Texts

In the past two decades,most of the researches on academic English of science and technology at home and abroad have focused on the analysis of a single dimension or a few linguistic features.There is still a gap in the research on multidimensional and multi-feature analysis of academic English.Based on the multidimensional analysis model proposed by Biber(1988),the present study uses the multidimensional analysis software MAT 1.3 developed by Nini(2015)and the statistical software for social sciences SPSS 21.0 to analyze and compare the self-built academic English text corpus of BUPT-MIC for Chinese learners and the British academic writing corpus of BAWE-T.The size of the Chinese and the English corpora are 271,449 and 1,443,44 words respectively.The findings showed that:first,the academic English papers of Chinese learners and native speakers differed in the first,third,and fifth dimension(p<0.05).Moreover,both Chinese and foreign learners’academic texts have a mixture of spoken and written language features,with Chinese learners showing more written language features and a higher degree of formalization in the first three dimensions,but Chinese learners have a more serious tendency to oral communication in the last three dimensions.Furthermore,92.5 percent of the linguistic features of both corpora are significantly different.Chinese learners’ academic English texts use these language features more frequently:amplifiers,discourse particles,1st person pronouns,possibility modals,2nd person pronouns,present tense verbs,sentence relatives,final prepositions,WH-question,and so on.Finally,they use language these features much lower than that of academic texts for native speakers:object WH clauses,parallel definite clauses,and subject WH clauses,conditional subordinate,obligatory modal verbs,predictive However and so on.The findings of the present study will help to cultivate the dimension awareness of second language learners in the process of academic writing,guide them to pay attention to the norms related to the academic writing of native speakers.So that learners can combine language function and language form,avoid the excessive use of language features that tend to be heavily colloquial,and thus write academic papers in English that are more in line with the domain of academic papers.