How Chinese Native Speakers Handle Written Style Material in Reading and its Application in Second Language Acquisition

In this paper, a new approach was employed to investigate the relationship between written Chinese and spoken Chinese. In a pilot study, how Chinese native speakers handle written style materials was investigated and compared with Chinese L2 learners. Preliminary findings reveal that both groups are aware of the variation of written levels in different genres. However, the written elements selected by Chinese native speakers include low frequency content words, content words related to the text theme, as well as idioms and poetic sentences. In addition, native speakers can interpret the written elements through their strong vocabulary knowledge, lexical network, and ability to apply their schema in reading. In contrast, L2 learners select more function words, classical words and idioms as written elements, and they lack the ability to interpret. The findings bear direct application on linguistic research and second language acquisition, and call for further research.