Using Small Corpora of Critiques to Set Pedagogical Goals in First Year ESP Business English

The current study explores small corpora of critiques written by Chinese and non-Chinese university students and how strategies used by these writers compare with high-rated L1 students. Data collection includes three small corpora of student writing; 20 student critiques in 2017, 23 student critiques from 2018, and 23 critiques from the online Michigan MICUSP collection at the University of Michigan. The researchers employ Text Inspector and Lexical Complexity to identify university students' vocabulary knowledge and awareness of syntactic complexity. In addition, WMatrix4® is used to identify and support the comparison of lexical and semantic differences among the three corpora. The findings indicate that gaps between Chinese and non-Chinese writers in the same university classes exist in students' knowledge of grammatical features and interactional metadiscourse. In addition, critiques by Chinese writers are more likely to produce shorter clauses and sentences. In addition, the mean value of complex nominal and coordinate phrases is smaller for Chinese students than for non-Chinese and MICUSP writers. Finally, in terms of lexical bundles, Chinese student writers prefer clausal bundles instead of phrasal bundles, which, according to previous studies, are more often found in texts of skilled writers. The current study's findings suggest incorporating implicit and explicit instruction through the implementation of corpora in language classrooms to advance skills and strategies of all, but particularly of Chinese writers of English.