(Mis)use of definition in Chinese EFL postgraduate students’ academic writing: A local grammar based investigation

Adopting a local grammar approach, the present study investigated Chinese EFL learners' use of the discourse act of definition in academic writing. A corpus of MA theses by Chinese EFL learners and a corpus of published research articles by expert writers in the field of Applied Linguistics were compiled for the current investigation. Instances of definition were retrieved by searching for a set of lexico-syntactic markers, and the subsequent local grammar analyses of these instances identified 26 highly frequent patterns associated with definition. Results showed that the Chinese EFL learners used substantially more definitions in their MA theses than expert writers did in research articles. Furthermore, subtle yet notable similarities and differences were observed between the two groups of writers' performance of definition at both the lexical-grammatical and discourse-semantic levels. It was argued that these observations not only bring us to a more nuanced understanding of the Chinese EFL learners’ use of definition in academic writing, but also provide important insights into EAP writing research and pedagogy in EFL contexts.