Ziqi Liu, Haitao Liu
| GLOTTOMETRICS | Issue 49, pp 32−51(2020) |
Abstract
What matters for a learner of English for academic purposes is to possess the ability to present results and achievements in international top journals. The ability is related to degrees of informality, vocabulary richness, and lexical complexity in academic writing. This study takes Chinese master degree candidates and advanced writers as research objects and concentrates on two research questions: (1) To what extent do Chinese master degree candidates and advanced writers differ in the use of informal features in their writings? (2) In what ways do Chinese master degree candidates and advanced
writers differ in vocabulary choices? The results are based on studying two datasets of the research objects. However, our results show that there is a complex picture for each informality indicator. Finally yet importantly, advanced writers show a higher level of vocabulary richness and complexity.
Keywords
Informality features, vocabulary richness and complexity, Chinese master degree candidates, advanced writers, academic writing, EFL.