ABSTRACT
Chapter Two explored the context of this study, considering Chinese students’ educational background prior to UK study, and outlining some of the main characteristics of their writing according to the research literature. This chapter reports the findings from my comparison of the two student corpora (Chi123 and Eng123), highlighting some of the distinguishing characteristics of Chinese students’ writing in English. The L1 Chinese student corpus is interrogated to uncover features which distinguish it from the larger corpus of writing by L1 English undergraduate students. First, the text characteristics of mean assignment length, mean sentence length and mean word length are discussed as these provide a broad profile of each dataset. I then turn to the corpus linguistic procedure of keyword searches as the main entry point used for uncovering variations in the two corpora; these provide corpus-driven insights into potential differences which are then explored through closer examination of the text (the distinction between corpus-driven and corpus-based research was explored in Chapter One). Insights from lecturer and student comments on writing are also drawn on throughout the chapter to give an emic or insider perspective of undergraduate student writing in universities today.
