Thai EFL Learners’ Writing Styles via Corpus Driven Approach
Burapha University, Thailand
ABSTRACT
Keyword analysis can be used to reveal learners' writing styles and also to observe the behaviors of overuse, underuse and misuse of EFL learners. This study therefore investigates EFL learners' writing style through the writing corpus comparing with British Academic Written English (BAWE) corpus using AntConc program. Learner corpus was gathered from 19 writing project assignments of English-major undergraduate students from Burapha University, Thailand. It was found that there were four overused patterns: the use of words for subjects in the study, 2) the use of "got" instead of "obtain", 3) the use of buy, buyer, buyers, buying and bought, and 4) "who" relative clauses. Also three underused patterns of learners are found as follows: 1) the underuse of hedges and attitude markers, 2) the underuse of contrastive linking words, and 3) the underuse of "its". It was found from that learners's overused and underused patterns (e.g. the use of plural/singular forms, the use of article - a/an/the ) that they have tried to avoid using some patterns by overusing that patterns that they were more confident to produce in their writing tasks. In addition, the spoken styles like informal words (e.g. got) were found frequently in their formal written assignment. Consequently, the findings could be implemented to curriculum design in selection of and the emphasis on certain written structure and vocabulary. It could benefit both teachers and learners in order to compare and enhance the awareness in the writing tasks with the reference corpus.
KEYWORDS
earner analysis, EFL learning, writing styles, keyness, corpus