Chinese Students’ Writing in English: Implications from a Corpus-driven Study

The research presented in this book contributes to a growing body of corpus-based analyses of L2 students’ academic writing. While previous studies tended to focus specifically on metadiscoursal features (for example Hyland 2004 ; Koutsantoni 2006 ; Wharton 2012 ), Maria Leedham’s interest was in identifying more generally the typical features of Chinese students’ writing in English. For this purpose, she analysed a corpus of assessed academic writing by Chinese students, which she compared with a reference corpus of English native-speaker (NS) students. The corpora consisted of 146 (Chinese) and 611 (English) undergraduate assignments, covering years 1–3 of degree programmes in Biology, Economics, and Engineering. Although Chinese students form the largest group of overseas students in British higher education, the features and development of their writing at university, particularly at the undergraduate level, have not been extensively explored. Most quantitative studies of L1 Chinese students’ writing used learner corpora which are unrepresentative of academic writing; by contrast, Leedham extracted her data from the British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus, which contains successful undergraduate and postgraduate assignments from a wide range of disciplines. Three questions were addressed in the study: (1) What are the distinguishing characteristics of writing in English in the Chinese students’ assignments?; (2) Are there variations in these characteristics between years 1–2 and year 3?; and (3) In what ways do disciplines affect the characteristics of Chinese undergraduate writing? The investigation of the second question was underpinned by Hoey’s (2005) lexical priming theory; variations between years 1–2 and year 3 were explained by the reconfiguration of the sets of the initial primings that students had brought to university with the more recent ones, developed at university.