An Empirical Study of the Conceptual Transfer Effect as Reflected in the L2 Acquisition of English Articles

Within the framework of Conceptual Transfer Hypothesis （Jarvis, 2007; 2011）, this paper investigates Chinese-speaking L2-English learners＇ computation of the uniqueness of noun phrases （NPs）, which further leads to their selection of English articles in marking the target NPs. An acceptability judgment task and a written interview task were used to collect data of L2 learners＇ interpretation of English articles. The results reveal that the L2 learners differ from native speakers in their computation of uniqueness of target NPs and in their L2-English article choices, and this difference can be attributed to their conceptual knowledge formed in the acquisition of the mother tongue and to their processing of such knowledge. Pedagogically, this study provides an explanation of L2-English article substitution errors from the perspective of conceptual transfer.

Move-Step Structure of the Introduction Section of English Medical Science Research Articles Written by Chinese Researchers Published in International Journals

In the past decades,a number of researchers have tried hard to identify the move-step structure of different sections in research articles(RAs)from various disciplines.However,there is a very few amount of previous studies conducted on the move-step structure of the Introduction section of English medical science research articles(MSRAs)written by Chinese researchers published in international journals.In order to fill this gap,the present study aims to identify the moves,steps,and their structure of the Introduction section of English MSRAs written by Chinese researchers at Zunyi Medical University(ZMU)published in international journals.To create the target corpus of the present study,30 Introductions were purposively selected from 25 international medical science journals,which were published from 2007 to 2015.It is worth noting that all the authors are restricted to Chinese researchers only and at least one author must come from ZMU.The framework of Kanoksilapatham’s(2005)was adopted for the move-step analysis in the present study.The results demonstrated that these Introduction sections were generally written with three moves following the selected framework.In addition,there were two new steps that occurred in the Introduction section of these English MSRAs.In conclusion,the findings of the present study might provide a guideline for the research who plan to write English MSRAs for international articles more effectively.Moreover,the findings may provide valuable information for academic writing textbook designers as well.

A genre analysis of medical abstracts by Chinese and English native speakers

This study presents statistical results of a comparison between English abstracts in a leading intemational medical journal and those in a Chinese one. With a genre analysis and discussion of linguistic features of these abstracts, the paper points out the weak points in the abstracts by Chinese writers and provides some suggestions for writing abstracts of medical research articles

LETTERS

I am an Australian living in Quanzhou, Fujian Province. I am employed as an English conversation teacher in a local middle school. I enjoy reading China Today and would be interested in writing an article on my impression of Quanzhou, or my experiences as a teacher in middle school or other topics that may be of interest to your readers.

The Schematic Structure of Literature Review in Research Articles of Applied Linguistics

本研究考察英汉学术论文文献综述部分的图式结构。通过对语料编码和体裁分析,发现四语步模式在中英文文献综述语篇中均为主导的图式结构。本文从体裁和跨文化视角分析了中英文应用语言学学科的论文文献综述部分的异同。中文文献综述不同于英文之处主要在于其语步结构呈直线型;其他差异限于语步之下的策略或步骤层面。本研究提出的语步结构模型可以给学术论文写作学习者和习作者提供有关文献综述图式结构的元语言知识,以帮助他们处理写作中常见的结构问题。