Some Linguistic Differences in the Written English of Chinese and Australian Students[2]

During 1978，39 Chinese students who were majoring in English at two language institutes in Northern China were asked to give short written answers in English to several questions. These questions related to the explanations that might repair social situations.The same questions were later answered by 62 Australian students of psychology at the University of New South Wales.Although the psychological interest in this material is somewhat outside the linguistic domain,the written answers given by both the Chinese and the Australian students provide a valuable corpus,since it is normally hard to obtain texts suitable for a contrastive analysis to show the differences between the English used by foreign language learners and by first language speakers.

The questionnaire asked the students to answer 10 questions. Ten lines were left between each question to indicate a maximum answer length,and the students were not restricted in the time they had to reply.For the present study,the answers to three of these questions have been analyzed：

1.How might a person who had caught cold explain to a friend why he had caught a cold?

2.Pretend that you have a younger brother who does not work hard at school.What would you say that might persuade him to work hard?

3.A high（middle）school student had failed to pass the higher school certificate（examination for entry to a university）.How might his friends account for that failure?

From the samples of 39 Chinese and 62 Australian students，24 papers were selected at random,to give texts from six male and six female students in each country. The method of analysis for the linguistic features in these texts mainly follows Halliday's method（1967，1970a，1970b，1975），with some partsfollowing C.V.Taylor（1979）.The analysis covers the experiential,interpersonal,textual,and logical components.

1.The Experiential Component

As both sets of students were asked the same questions,it was at first expected that with the same field of discourse,that is,the type of action constrained by each of the three questions,the realization of the experiential component of language function in the two groups would be about the same. That is true to a certain degree,as one does find that some“participants”and“processes”are similar in the answers from both groups,such as weather,night,wind,future,laziness,teacher,ill/sick,intelligence,nervous,prepare,university,exam,success,to say nothing of the contextualized words given in the questions,such as caught cold,brother,school,and failure.But what attracts us immediately is that the diversity in the choice of lexis,or of participants,processes and circumstances—in Halliday's terms（1970a），is much greater than their similarity.Compare the following two groups：

Australians：wet hair,draught,mates,blurb,material,gum,onus,emotional problems,crisis,stress,mental block,tension,nervous build-up,slackness,potential,sensitive,regurgitate,system,motivation,virus,get-rich-quick stories,vitamin pills,brainy,unemployment,prospects,fool around,pick on,run down,scare the pants off,etc.

Chinese：

countryside,middle school,knowledge,movie,good-for-nothing,change/changeable,wear clothes,criticize,grow up,play basketball/ping-pang,lag behind,in the campus,etc.

What makes the difference?Halliday（1970a）says that“language serves for the expression of content,that is,of the speaker's experience of the real world,including the inner world of his own consciousness.”To put it another way,language represents speaker's experience of the processes,persons,objects,abstractions,qualities,states and relations in the world around him and inside him. Starting from this point,one can see clearly from the content analyses of the responses in Tables 1，2 and 3 that the diversity of the experientialcomponent in the two groups is due mainly to differences in the informants'social or cultural backgrounds.Informants in the two countries have their own experience of the real world.

Table 1 Answers（in rank order）to the question about catching cold

Table 2 Answers（in rank order）to the question about a younger brother who does not work hard at school

Table 3 Answers（in rank order）to the question about explaining why a person had failed to gain entry to a university

Among the reasons given for catching a cold,quite a few Chinese students attributed it to not wearing enough clothes：because of climatic variations,the northern part of China is much colder than the State of New South Wales. Furthermore,since intermural stoves and the central heating system are only used in the coldest months in the north,the majority of the people have to put on more clothes to keep warm.One Chinese student wrote，“I was watching the movie in the campus,when it started to rain……This morning I found I had a cold.”The link between“watching the movie in the campus”（which would not be outside in Australia）and“having a cold”would not normally be made by an Australian student.But in China,films for recreation and for educational purposes are often shown at night,free of charge and in the open air,by many institutions to entertain more people than could fit into a hall.Likewise,the Australian students gave some answers that would not be comprehended by the Chinese.One said，“Because he didn't take enough vitamin pills.”In China,vitamin pills are mainly for people with weak health and not for preventing colds.The answers given by two Australian girls were“It may have been due to going out with wet hair on a wet night，”and“I went to bed with my hair wet.”That is an unlikely sequence of events in China.

Answers to the second question about a younger brother show a striking difference between student life in China and Australia. Since it is easy to deferentry to the university,to change course,or become a mature-age student in Australia,an Australian student would be puzzled by the Chinese answer that“If you don't work hard,you will not be able to enter a university and you will have to settle down in the countryside.”There are two implications.For one thing,the scope of tertiary education is limited in China.Only those school leavers who can pass the entrance examination have a chance to study in universities or tertiary institutes and in 1978，6 million Chinese students competed for 290，000 places（Times Higher Education Supplement,December 14，1979）.In New South Wales there were more places than students who applied for them.Secondly,since there are not many job vacancies in the cities,the Chinese government's policy was to encourage high school leavers who could not get a tertiary place to settle down in rural areas or in border regions.Between 1968 and 1976，12 million students went down to the countryside.（That is not the practice today,but those students writing early in 1978 still thought of it as a possibility.）The notion of unemployment was not established in China in 1978 and this might explain why that word is missing from the Chinese texts.An Australian answer advocating hard work because“get-rich quick stories are only for the lucky few”suggests that it is acceptable for someone to amass personal wealth.Such an expression was not used by Chinese students because the word rich in their context is always regarded as a bourgeois idea,despite the fact that they want to have a better standard of living.

Some Australian answers,such as a mental block,emotional crisis,and nervous build-up involve expressions about life in Australia. Others like mates,uni,blurb,regurgitate,picked on,lax,froze,it is a virus that is going round；that would probably scare the pants off him,are familiar or colloquial terms not easily available to foreign language learners.On the other hand,the Chinese refer to middle school instead of high school,because the word middle is a literal translation of the Chinese character zhong in zhong xue.Furthermore,Chinese students learn English in a comparatively narrow way；their repeated use of terms such as good-for-nothing,is an example of a phrase from a textbook.

Abbreviations and symbols such as etc.，&，i. e.，e.g.were widely used by the Australia students,but not by the Chinese students.

From what has been cited above we can conclude that the option choice of participants,processes and circumstances is constrained both by the linguistic context and by the social and cultural context.

The choice of words is also related to mastering the lexical system. This can be substantiated by studying lexical density.The notion of determining a ratio between grammatical and lexical words in a text originated from Ure（1969）and is primarily a means of register differentiation.Taylor（1979）made a further distinction between lexicality and lexical density.He says that lexicality measures the percentage of lexical words in a text,and that lexical density shows the number of lexical item types as a proportion of all lexical occurrences.Texts with lower scores on either lexicality or lexical density are easier to understand than are those with higher scores.Table 4 shows that the answers from the Australian students are in fact higher in both cases than are their Chinese counterparts.This shows that the Australian students,with English as their mother tongue,chose more options in the lexical network.

Table 4 Lexicality and lexical density（following Taylor 1979）

2.The Interpersonal Component

Language is not only used to describe experience,but also to show relationships between the speech participants. This interpersonal component of language function is realized in mood and modality in the systemic-functional approach（Halliday 1970b）.

Mood refers to the selection by the speaker of a particular role in the speech situation,and his determination of the choice of roles for the addressees. The options are usually the declarative,interrogative and imperative forms.The declarative mood is always the predominant type in discourse.In these texts all the interrogatives and imperatives are found in the Chinese answers to the second question about the younger brother who does not work hard at school.For instance，“Don't you feel ashamed to be the one who is always lagging behind in your class?”“Try to make sense of your life and study hard at school……”

Linguistically,the explanation of this phenomenon is a matter of roleadoption. The Chinese students answer as though their brother were present,the former being the addressers,and the latter the addressees.Quite differently,the Australians accepted the role of responding to the addresser,who in this context was the person who had constructed the questionnaire.The brother then played the role of the third party,as the speech participant.

Extralinguistically,the choice of mood system is constrained by the personal tenor,that is,the relation between speech participants. In a Chinese family,it is often the case that the elder has a responsibility to look after the younger,and therefore tends to assume an authoritative tone,which accounts for the imperative mood in these answers.It can also be noted that even the interrogative mood is used to express warning or admonition in a functional-pragmatic way.Although older children in Australia help with the younger ones,that does not give them authority to assume a superior status.Their answers were therefore more likely to use persuasion than admonition or criticism.Australian students also referred to their own success or failure,even if ironically.For example，“Use myself,as an example and say to him that he doesn't want to end up like his elder brother，”“If he works hard he may one day be as brainy as his big brother，”and“You could relate your own success or failure to your own efforts at school……”No Chinese students gave an answer offering advice through such a personal comparison.The Australian students tend to speak with reservation and assume a suggestive tone,whereas the Chinese students are more explicit,which is a reflection of the social conventions they have followed.That can also be shown by the difference in.the preference of modality and modulation in the students'written answers.

Modality,as the speaker's assessment of probability and predictability,is external to the content,being a part of the speaker's attitude to the listener. On the other hand,modulation is part of the ideational content of a clause,and characterizes the relation of the participant to a process,in terms of ability,inclination,permission,obligation and compulsion（Halliday 1970b）.Examples of modality in the Australian answers are，“That would probably scare the pants off him，”“He might explain that he had been caught in the rain……，”“I'd try and find out way and go from there，”“A mental block or perhaps some emotional crisis within his family that has disrupted his studies，”and“I don't think they'd see him as lacking intelligence.”

Under modulation,the Chinese students preferred to use root modals like should and will,and suppletive modals such as have to,to be able to,etc. For instance，“You shouldn't neglect your study……，”“You must work hard now.Otherwise you can do nothing when you grow up，”“He had to spend most of his time in comforting his mother，”“What's more you will not be able to pass the examination，”and“If you don't work hard now,you'll regret it when you grow up.”The Chinese students were particularly fond of using the last structure“If……not,you'll……”（in 16 cases）.

This clearly reflects a definitive way of thinking. In this corpus the ratio of the frequency of modality in the interpersonal component between the Australian students and the Chinese students is 35：17（2.1：1），whereas the ratio of the frequency of modulation in the experiential component is 19：33（0.58：1）.

3.The Textual Component

There are some differences with respect to theme and cohesion,which are important items in the textual component. The former functions within the sentence and the latter beyond the sentence.

Theme is the point of departure for the message,and always comes first in a sentence（Halliday 1967）. It is defined so that the subject in a declarative clause,the WH-element in a WH-interrogative and the finite verbal element in a polar interrogative,are all unmarked themes.Consequently,a theme is marked when some other elements in a sentence take the initial position.Table 5 shows the number of marked themes in this corpus.