Abstract
<p>Researches into colloquialisation in academic writing have become increasingly popular in recent years. However, little has been conducted to the dimension of grammar. Thus, through the corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis method, the present study compiled three corpora extracted from Chinese MA theses, PhD dissertations and international journals, aiming to explore the grammatical colloquial features and non-colloquial features in Chinese EFL learners’ theses. Compared with international journals, both MA theses and PhD dissertations displayed strong colloquial tendency. The similarities between MA theses and PhD dissertations outweigh their differences. Besides, doctoral dissertations are not less colloquial than MA theses. The statistical evidence suggests that the EFL learners in China lack the register consciousness of academic writing and fail to comply with the conventional pragmatic paradigm of academic discourse. With the intention to deepen EFL learners’ stylistic awareness and decrease their colloquial tendency, the study offers some suggestions, seeking for the pedagogical implications for English academic writing.</p>
Highlights
1.1 Background of the StudyColloquialisation, the increasing acceptance of colloquial features especially in more formal genres, has been a great grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century (Collins, 2013). Collins & Yao (2013) focused on the grammatical colloquialisation across a range of registers in ten world Englishes including British English, American English, Australian English and so forth
Through the corpus-based quantitative and qualitative analysis method, the present study compiled three corpora extracted from Chinese MA theses, PhD dissertations and international journals, aiming to explore the grammatical colloquial features and non-colloquial features in Chinese EFL learners’ theses
The comparison is carried out between the MA theses and doctoral dissertations written by Chinese EFL learners as well as the theses written by international journals
Summary
1.1 Background of the StudyColloquialisation, the increasing acceptance of colloquial features especially in more formal genres, has been a great grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century (Collins, 2013). Collins & Yao (2013) focused on the grammatical colloquialisation across a range of registers in ten world Englishes including British English, American English, Australian English and so forth. Colloquialisation, the increasing acceptance of colloquial features especially in more formal genres, has been a great grammatical change in English since the mid-twentieth century (Collins, 2013). The findings indicated that the ten Englishes investigated displayed different levels of colloquial tendency. This suggests that couples of colloquial expressions have been accepted by formal registers, which provided some practical and indicative information for the following studies. One same genre shared identical standardization in mode and same prescriptivism in convention, which stipulated that the language users must observe the conventional paradigm to conduct verbal communication activities. Academic discourses, categorized as written language, are featured by the particular paradigm of verifiability, predictability and reproducibility. The expressions in academic writing are required to be formal, standard and non-colloquial
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