學生的英文作文、英文教科書、英文學術研究論文之詞彙特徵與句法複雜性分析

Lexical Features and Syntactic Complexity in Academic Research Articles, English Textbooks, and Taiwanese EFL Learners’College Entrance Examination Writing

學術寫作的特點在於準確的詞彙使用和複雜的句子結構。為探討台灣的大學入學考試英文作文、英語教科書和學術期刊論文在詞彙特徵和句法複雜性方面的不同，本研究採用語料庫分析方法。本研究首先建立了三個語料庫，包括教育部出版的138篇台灣大學的入學考試英文作文、三個出版社出版的高中教科書第四冊和第五冊的課文，共120課、以及學術期刊論文包括應用語言學、經濟學和心理學，共收集了45篇學術期刊論文。語料庫構建完成後，使用線上字彙分析軟體Vocabprofilers和Coh-Metrix對詞彙使用進行分析。此外，以線上軟體syntactic complexity analyzer對句子結構進行分析。本研究有以下發現。首先，與教科書和學生的寫作相比，學術研究文章明顯使用了更多的學術詞彙、也顯示詞彙多樣性、較少的詞彙密度和常用字彙。其次，學術研究文章的平均句子長度、平均t-unit長度和平均從屬子句長度比教科書和學生的作文更長。另一方面，與學生的英文寫作相比，教科書在上述類別上顯示出細微的差異。基於上述結果，本研究討論了一些教學方面的應用與未來可行的研究方向。

Academic writing features precise vocabulary use and sophisticated sentence structure. This study intended to explore lexical features and syntactic complexity in Taiwanese college entrance examination essay writing, English textbooks, and academic research articles. This study adopted corpus analysis methodology. The researcher began with collecting research data and then built three corpora, including 138 Taiwanese college entrance examination compositions, published by Ministry of Education (MOE), 120 textbook lessons in Book 4 and 5 for senior high schools from three publishers, and 45 academic research articles collected from Applied Linguistic, Economics, and Psychology. After the corpora were built, lexical features and syntactic complexity in the corpora were analyzed with the online computation software Vocabprofilers and Coh-Metrix for vocabulary use, and Syntactic Complexity Analyzer for sentence structures. This study has the following findings. First, academic research articles significantly employed far more academic vocabulary, higher lexical diversity, fewer lexical density, fewer frequent words than textbooks and students’essay writing. Second, academic research articles displayed longer mean length of sentence, mean length of t-unit, and mean length of clause than textbooks and students’essay writing. Textbooks showed slight differences in the above categories compared to students’essay writing. Based on the above results, some pedagogical applications are discussed.