Author(s)

Jueyu Lu

Corresponding Author

Jueyu Lu

ABSTRACT

As English has become the dominant language of instruction in higher education, it is becoming increasingly important in countries where it has traditionally been taught as a foreign language or a second language, such as China. Studying Chinese students’ academic Spoken English performance and comparing it to the general performance of academic English to identify differences can help to better target Chinese students to approach the purpose of academic English and convey arguments better. This study focuses on Chinese students’ spoken academic English, with an emphasis on the use of the pronouns “I” and “you”. Through corpus-based analysis, the characteristics of Chinese students’ use of these two pronouns were identified and compared with the features of academic English speaking in general to identify areas where Chinese students’ pronoun use can be improved.

KEYWORDS

Corpus-based analysis, Personal pronoun use, Chinese student, academic spoken English, higher education