“I Think” in NS and Chinese NNS Spoken English

Abstract

In spoken English, “I think” is a frequently-used chunk. The frequent use of “I think” in the Chinese non-native speakers' (NNSs') speech has been interpreted as being somewhat overused in previous studies, such as Xu and Xu (2007) and Yang and Wei (2005). The same phenomenon is also found in the present study, which is based on a detailed analysis of three corpora: The Spoken English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SECCL), MICASE and ICE-GB. “I think” is over-represented in the Chinese NNSs' speech in SECCL. However, it is questionable as to whether the Chinese NNSs use “I think” too much, and inappropriately. The investigation into the frequency information and contexts provides an explanation of the generic constraints and national backgrounds underlying the over-representation of “I think” in the speech of Chinese NNSs as well as revealing differences between Chinese NNSs and NSs.

A corpus-based contrastive analysis ofI thinkin spoken Hong Kong English: Research from the International Corpus of English (ICE)

“…Regarding the differences and similarities between HKE and BrE speakers in using ITH in the two types of conversations, HK speakers use ITH more frequently in private conversations as compared to GB speakers, whereas in public conversations, HK speakers use ITH slightly less as compared to GB speakers. This finding is not exactly in line with previous findings, which suggests that Chinese L2 English speakers consistently overuse ITH in their spoken English as compared to NSs (Huang 2011(Huang , 2014Wang, 2007). The present study sheds some light on the influence of speech genre (public vs. private) in the use of ITH among NNSs (HK) and NSs (GB).…”

“…Baumgarten and House (2010) found that ITH is used differently by native (NSs) and nonnative speakers (NNSs) of English in L1-L1 and L2-L2 interactions in terms of distribution and functional profiles. In particular, Chinese speakers of English have been found to overuse the phrase ITH in both written and oral discourse (Huang, 2011(Huang, , 2014Mei, 2012;Wang, 2007;Wang & Zhu, 2005;Wu et al, 2010;Yang & Wei, 2005). In addition to overall frequency, the position, collocations and functions of ITH also show significant differences in NS and NNS English.…”

“…Some previous research, such as Huang (2014), has been done differentiating between two types of ITH as used by Chinese speakers of English: discoursal use and non-discoursal use of ITH. However, Huang (2014) also acknowledged that the distinction between the two types of ITH is not always clear.…”

“…ITH, as one of the most frequently used pragmatic and discourse markers in the speech of native varieties of English (O'Keeffe et al, 2007;Stenström, 1994), is also frequently overused by Chinese speakers of English (cf. Huang, 2014;Wang, 2007;Wang & Zhu, 2005;Xu & Xu, 2007). Xu and Xu (2007) found that Chinese speakers tend to overuse I-perspective expressions, such as I think, I mean, I want to say, I agree and I don't agree, to express their opinions as compared to NSs who prefer to use indirect language, which gives the listener a bad impression of "self-centeredness" (Xu & Xu, 2007, p. 440).…”