A Corpus-based Analysis of English Essays of Chinese EFL Learners

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

A Corpus-based Analysis of English Essays of Chinese EFL Learners. This study compares the university students’ essays from two English corpora: Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays (LOCNESS) of American & British university students, and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL) of Chinese university students. Using the multidimensional analysis method developed by Biber (1988), it investigates a range of linguistic features in Biber's Dimension 1 in the essays of the two corpora. The results show that the Chinese university students’ essays contain more interactional language features in writing than those of the American & British counterparts, even though both essay groups are highly informational in nature. Chinese university EFL students overuse interaction-oriented linguistic features while they underuse information-focused linguistic features. In addition, the strong transfer of Chinese linguistic features is observed throughout the Chinese students’ essays, confirming the powerful role of transfer in L2 learning process.

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