Pixel International Conferences

Based on a multi-dimensional analysis (MDA) approach, this study investigated the linguistic variation in Japanese students' (intermediate and advanced Chinese level) Chinese writing and compared it with that of Chinese native speakers. Ten sub-corpora were used in this study, comprised of Chinese writings (1,450 texts) in 5 genres (narrative essay, character description, diary, letter, and argumentative essay) from Japanese students and native Chinese speakers. The frequencies of 92 linguistic features were counted by Python programming based on the part-of-speech tag for each text. Factor_analyzer (Miners solution and Promax rotation) of the Python module performed an exploratory factor analysis on the frequency data of linguistic features, revealing four functional dimensions (i) Variety vs. Paucity of Vocabulary Output, (ii) Situational Description, (iii) Adverbial Modification, and (iv) Action Behavior Description. Multiple comparison tests showed that the Chinese writings of Japanese students and Chinese native speakers varied greatly in the first three dimensions, while the fourth dimension mainly reflected the variation between composition genres. Overall, this study shows the successful application of MDA in L2 Chinese writing.

Keywords multi-dimensional analysis, linguistic features, Japanese Chinese learners, Chinese writing

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