Making a Bigger Deal of the Smaller Words: Function Words and Other Key Items in Research Writing by Chinese Learners

Autor/inn/en	Lee, David Y. W.; Chen, Sylvia Xiao
Titel	Making a Bigger Deal of the Smaller Words: Function Words and Other Key Items in Research Writing by Chinese Learners
Quelle	In: Journal of Second Language Writing, 18 (2009) 3, S.149-165 (17 Seiten)Infoseite zur Zeitschrift PDF als Volltext Verfügbarkeit
Sprache	englisch
Dokumenttyp	gedruckt; online; Zeitschriftenaufsatz
ISSN	1060-3743
DOI	10.1016/j.jslw.2009.05.004
Schlagwörter	Undergraduate Students; Second Language Learning; Applied Linguistics; Writing (Composition); English (Second Language); Foreign Countries; Student Research; Research Papers (Students); Academic Discourse; Second Language Instruction; Computational Linguistics; Chinese; Native Speakers; Comparative Analysis; Teaching Methods; English for Academic Purposes; Grammar; China + Suchen Sie Ihr Suchwort? Zweitsprachenerwerb; Linguistics; Linguistik; Angewandte Linguistik; Schreibübung; English as second language; English; Second Language; Englisch als Zweitsprache; Ausland; Studentenforschung; Discourse; Diskurs; Fremdsprachenunterricht; Computerlinguistik; China; Chinesen; Muttersprachler; Teaching method; Lehrmethode; Unterrichtsmethode; Grammatik
Abstract	In many mainland Chinese universities, undergraduate students specializing in English language and applied linguistics are required to write a dissertation, in English, of about 5000 words exploring some aspect of original research. This is a task which is of considerable difficulty not only at the genre or discourse level but also at the lexico-grammatical level. The teaching of academic writing in Chinese universities tends to focus on general discourse-level features such as "move" structures, while the more micro, form-focused knowledge and skills are comparatively underexplored and usually based on intuition or an arbitrary selection of features. This paper presents a data-driven, pedagogically oriented analysis of a corpus of 78 Chinese undergraduate dissertations alongside 2 comparison native-speaker corpora, focusing on characteristically problematic areas, as revealed through keywords analyses and complementary qualitative investigations of collocations and word clusters. Most of the overuse of words and phrases turns out to involve function words and high-frequency "common" words which are typically not the focus of academic writing instruction. These usages are highly patterned rather than random, thus being in principle amenable to teaching using a data-driven pedagogical approach. The paper argues that by systematically deriving potential teaching items from a learner corpus, EAP writing pedagogy can be more needs-based and learner-centered, which are two facilitating conditions for successful form-focused instruction. (Contains 3 tables.) (As Provided).
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Update	2017/4/10