国内外英语科技论文整体特征的计量对比

A Quantitative Study on the Global Complexity Features of SCI Papers by Chinese and Native English Researchers

为了解国内科研人员的英语论文写作水平与英语母语作者之间的差距,本研究自建了国内SCI英文期刊论文语料库(SCI-CN),从词汇复杂度、句法复杂度和可读性这三个方面,与基于英语国家语料库(BNC)的科技论文子库(SCI-BR)进行系统的计量对比。研究发现SCI-CN与SCI-BR的文章在平均词长和多项句法复杂度指标上存在显著差异,前者的整体可读性要明显弱于后者。换言之,国内科技人员发表的英语论文明显要比英语母语作者发表的同类论文更难理解。类似的问题在社科领域的论文中也同样存在。这可能说明国内ESP学术论文写作教学对文章的可读性强调不够,需要引起学界的重视。

To understand the gap of English writing proficiency between Chinese and native English researchers,this study adopts a quantitative research method,taking SCI-CN(collected from SCI-indexed journals in China and written by Chinese researchers)and SCI-BR(collected from journals of natural science and applied science in BNC)as samples and compares their similarities and differences in terms of readability as well as lexical and syntactic complexity.Results show that the readability of SCI-CN articles is significantly lower than that of the SCI-BR ones,and there are significant differences between the two in average word length and multiple syntactic complexity indicators.In other words,English papers published by domestic scientists are obviously more difficult to understand than those published by native English speakers.Similar problems also exist in social science articles.This indicates that the importance of readability is underestimated in domestic ESP writing teaching and adequate attention is needed in the whole academic community.