(Correspondent Cao Keting)

    On May 30th, Professor Dilin Liu from the Department of English, the University of Alabama, USA visited the School of Foreign Languages and delivered a lecture entitled “Gaining In-depth Understandings of L2 Acquisition via Corpus Analysis: The Case of Chinese EFL Writers’ Use of English lexis/Articles”. The lecture, hosted by Professor Xuefang Feng, director of the Research Center for Foreign Language Education, attracted over 40 faculty, postgraduates and undergraduates.

    Professor Dilin Liu stated that with the help of corpus, we can gain insights into the features of language produced by second language learners and the unique challenges faced by them, thereby transcending the limitations of conventional methodologies and uncovering regularities in language acquisition. He vividly demonstrated the prowess of deep corpus analysis through an empirical study which compares the vocabulary usage patterns of Chinese English learners with those of native English speakers.

    Professor Dilin Liu highlighted a thought-provoking finding from his analysis of corpora derived from theses and dissertations of Chinese master's and doctoral students: these advanced learners tend to overuse definite articles while underusing indefinite articles in their written work. He listed possible causes of these problems and provided pedagogical suggestion and potential topics for future research.

    The session concluded with a Q&A segment where Professor Dilin Liu addressed queries from attendees, sparking lively academic discussion. Participants lauded the lecture for its richness in content, deeming it not only lively and intriguing but also highly enlightening.