A CONSIDERATION OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SPOKEN AND WRITTEN ENGLISH OF NATIVE SPEAKERS AND JAPANESE LEARNERS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

It is often said that speeches and writings vary greatly with regard to vocabulary and grammar. However, how these differences can be seen in language use by English native speakers and non-native speakers has not been wholly elucidated. The current study, using the International Corpus Network of Asian Learners of English (ICNALE), quantitatively compares topic-controlled speeches and writings by native speakers and Japanese learners of English. Our learner-corpus-based analyses revealed that the difference is not as substantial as widely believed for native speakers in terms of highly frequent words, frequency of eleven textual indices, statistical positioning of individual samples, clustering structure of the indices, and the relationship between the production mode and the indices