Abstract

This study presents the systematic language varieties and discourse characteristics that are indicative of the academic writings of Chinese and American scientists. We conduct a Contrastive Corpus Analysis using the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to identify indicative linguistic features in Chinese science journal abstracts as compared to American science abstracts. The results suggest that Chinese scientists tend to employ different linguistic features from their American counterparts. Specifically, the science abstracts written by Chinese scientists are at a greater level of cohesion, more syntactically difficult, but less abstract in the structure of lexicon compared with those written by American scientists. We conclude that the results may account for the interpretation of Chinese academic writings of English as non-prototypical or Outsiders as opposed to the prototypical model of Insiders in terms of discourse style. This study sheds light on language varieties and methodology that may be helpful to English as a Second Language Learners as well as materials developers in non-English-speaking countries such as China.

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