Corpus-based English writing research and pedagogy for Chinese college students: A case study of causality devices

This study explores great potentials of computer corpus in English writing research and pedagogy via an in-depth comparative analysis of causality devices in Chinese EFL student writings. Our corpus-based study shows better performances of senior students (CLEC ST6 as against CLEC ST5) in the overall frequency, lexical richness, positionings and semantic prosody of the causality devices though still somehow deviant from western discourse norms.