Abstract
Writing is one of productive skills and a way of conveying information considered to be the most complex and the most challenging skill for EFL English learners to acquire, hence many studies have been conducted on the revelation of the characteristic of writings of EFL learners and how to improve them. Among them, pronoun study has attracted extensive interest and become a hot spot in the second language acquisition and contrastive linguistics. Taking a series of compositions of “The most unforgettable person I ever know” as subject, this study is devoted to reveal the characteristics of “who and its concordance” in Chinese college students` English narrative writing from the perspective of corpus-based method. Result of contrastive analysis of writing from 630 college students of 3 colleges in the past 6 years shows: 1) As a whole, WIC can be regarded as common words for Chinese college students but the distribution of individual word is relatively disproportionate-“who” attracts far more attention while the other 4 words attract little or no attention. 2) In terms of sentence type, the distribution of the 5 types is imbalance with too little use of adverbial clause and too much of attributive clauses. In addition, the learners are used to utilizing simple and identical sentence structure and some of them are highly repetitive. 3) The use frequency of WIC of individual student shows that the majority numbers of learners have formed the habit of using them to depict interpersonal relationship and their distribution is unbalanced too. 4) As to the clusters, the learners have formed the habit of preference use of “who” as a relative pronoun above all. And some clusters are highly identical and simple. 5) To sum up, the majority of learners in this study can employ WIC consciously in their writing, but their usages are confined to simple words and structures. Therefore, the learner`s comprehensive competence of integrated employment of WIC should be improved.
Highlights
1.1 Research BackgroundAmong the five basic skills of learning a language---listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, writing is one of the productive skills and a way of conveying information and is widely acknowledged as an “intricate” and complex task as well as the “most difficult of the language abilities to acquire” for EFL English learners because it is a process of recreation which requires one's high logical ability of analyzing, organizing and arranging information to express ideas (Allen & Corder, 1974, p. 177)
The “who” ranks 35 in frequency of all the words, which further confirmed that it is very popular in this study
The employment of WIC in Chinese college students English narrative writings bears the following features: 1) As a whole, WIC can be regarded as common words for Chinese college students because of their high frequency in this study
Summary
Among the five basic skills of learning a language---listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating, writing is one of the productive skills and a way of conveying information and is widely acknowledged as an “intricate” and complex task as well as the “most difficult of the language abilities to acquire” for EFL English learners because it is a process of recreation which requires one's high logical ability of analyzing, organizing and arranging information to express ideas (Allen & Corder, 1974, p. 177). It is widely acknowledged that the effect of writing teaching has long been inefficient and time-consuming, of which China is one of the most severe disaster areas according to previous statistics of international language test analysis, such as IELTS, TOFEL. Since the late 1980s, the use of corpora has been increasingly applied to various fields of applied linguistics, especially to the Second Language Acquisition and English Language Teaching because the advent of computer elt.ccsenet.org. With the availability of the text of learner corpora, SLA researchers are beginning to focus on descriptive aspects of interlanguage processes and to discover in more detail the use/misuse of language features and their frequencies and distribution at different developmental stages (Li, 2017). Methods adopted in the corpus linguistics have been applied to almost all the fields of linguistics
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