Corpus-based Study of FOREIGN in English Newspapers and its Pedagogical Implications

This study adopts the methodology of corpus-based analysis and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA) and uses two corpora (Chinese English Newspapers Corpus and American English Newspapers Corpus) as the source of data to make an empirical study on the use of the word, foreign. Major findings show that firstly Chinese English newspapers tend to overuse foreign and collocations of foreign are more diversified in Chinese English newspapers than those in native English newspapers, and secondly Chinese English newspapers focus on the neutral sense of foreign while neglecting its derogative meanings. Based on the above findings, pedagogical implications have been stated at last.


INTRODUCTION
A corpus is defined as "a collection of examples of language in use that are selected and compiled in a principled way" (Huang & Yao, 2015;Duan, 2017;Sadi, 2017) and corpus linguistics as linguistic studies of such corpora.Corpus linguistics is considered a new scholarly enterprise in current years.Over the last forty years, there has been a great development in the compilation and analysis of corpora stored in computerized databases.According to Biber (2000), a corpus-based approach to linguistic studies and language teaching possess many advantages with which the traditional approaches cannot compete.Firstly, computers make it possible to identify and analyze complex patterns of language use; secondly, they allow the storage and analysis of a larger database of natural language than could be dealt with by hand; thirdly, they provide consistent, reliable analyses---they do not suffer from mental fatigue or indecisiveness; fourthly, they can be used interactively, allowing the human analyst to make difficult linguistic judgments while the computer manages all the record-keeping.
With its rapidly growing economy, China nowadays is more deeply involved in global cooperation and development than ever before.Therefore, a window for the world to learn more about China is greatly needed.Today Chinese English newspapers have become one of the major ways for the world to know more about China, so scholars now are more concerned about how Chinese English newspapers can express the intended messages effectively.
Yu Xi (2006) conducted a study on the usage of a specific word foreign to see whether there were differences in the use of foreign between Chinese English news reports and native English news reports.His research found the overuse of foreign in Chinese English news reports.However, there were some limitations in his study.He did not find out the specific reasons behind the overuse of foreign.More importantly, the material (English news report articles) which he used in the research has been out-of-date, and cannot reflect the current situation of the English news reports.Thus, there is an urgent need to collect the most updated data to conduct the research.
The present study aims to investigate the differences in the use of adjective foreign by China's English news reporters and native English news reporters.A corpus-based approach and Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis (CIA, hereafter) are adopted in the present study.Besides, a further study is conducted to explore the possible causes behind these differences.The present study is intended to help raise both teachers' and learners' awareness of the understanding and proper use of the word foreign in English writing.

Material
In this study, the researchers compile two new corpora to study the use of foreign.One is the American English newspapers corpus (hereafter AEC), which contains 366,221 words of the news reports from five major American English newspapers (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles, Chicago Tribute).The other one is the Chinese English newspapers corpus (hereafter CEC), which gathers a total number of 304,682 words from four major Chinese English newspapers (China Daily, Beijing Review, Xinhua News, 21st Century).All the news reports were collected from 2011 to 2016, which the researchers believe can reflect the current trend of the word usage.The following are the descriptive data of the two corpora used in the present study.

Instrumentation
In this research, AntConc3.4.3 is used as the search tool in linguistic analysis.The program functions include wordlist, concordance, collocates, keyword list, concordance plot, file view and clusters.Moreover, online calculation instrument---Log-likelihood Calculation is used to test the keyness of the word foreign.

Contribution of this paper to the literature
• The present study uses corpus approach to analyze the word FOREIGN based on a large quantity of data, which is innovative in that the findings are more reliable compared with the previous studies in this field which usually used a small number of data to make analysis.The research findings can extend the scope of earlier studies of English lexis.
• The findings explored by the present study can offer pedagogical implications that English vocabulary teaching should focus on its all-round meaning so that learners can use words in appropriate situations.
• The corpus-based methodology used by the present study can be applied to help learners with English learning.Although textbooks and handbooks can offer meanings and usage of English words, there is little guidance as to how often and in what specific situations they should use these words to be able to approximate good native English writing.A large collection of native English corpus and software such as AntCont used in this study can fill this gap.

Overall Frequencies of FOREIGN
The overall frequency of foreign in the two corpora-CENC and AENC is first examined.Table 2 shows the number of types and tokens of foreign in the two corpora.Since the corpora differ in size, the number of tokens per 10,000 words is also given.
Table 2 shows that the Chinese English newspapers tend to use foreign more frequently than the native English newspapers (13.03 vs. 4.86 per 10,000), which might indicate that Chinese English newspapers overuse the word foreign.The researchers will then conduct a test from a statistical perspective, to see whether the observed overall frequencies in the two corpora do reveal something significant.
The current study employs an online test, Log-likelihood Calculation.Following the instructions, the researchers enter the plain numbers respectively shown in Figure 1, then press the button "Calculation LL", and the result appears within a second as is presented in Figure 2. Figure 3 tells how this tool works.
Figure 2 shows that G2 is 3.87, larger than G2 of 3.84 at the level of p<0.05 (as shown in Figure 4).And the "+" in Figure 2 indicates the overuse in Corpus 1, the CEC, relative to Corpus 2, the AEC.The instructions in Figure 4 show that the higher the G2 value is, the more significant is the difference between two frequency scores.
With the statistics shown above, the current research can draw a conclusion that the difference between word frequencies of foreign in the two corpora is of great significance (Ho et al., 2017).Next, a further study on foreign between the two corpora will be carried out.

The Collocations of Adjective FOREIGN in CENC and AENC
This section will examine the collocations of foreign in the two corpora and try to find out whether there is any difference between the two corpora in the collocation of this word.From the above table, it can be see that there are some similarities in the use of frequent collocations of foreign in the two corpora.Among the top ten collocations, there are six collocations appearing in both corpora.They are: foreign minister(s), foreign exchange(s), foreign policy/policies, foreign investment(s), foreign affair(s), and foreign investors.The researchers also find that in CEC and AEC, most of foreign's collocations are noun phrases.But when it comes to the tokens and types, it is found that CEC's three frequently used collocations: foreign company (companies), foreign country (countries) and foreign trade are rarely seen in AEC.Furthermore, in CEC there are 87 types of nouns which are modified by foreign, while in AEC, there are 46 types of nouns modified by foreign.Generally speaking, native English speakers tend to use words in a more flexible way, and the collocations of the words may appear to be more varied.But with regard to the types of nouns modified by foreign in the two corpora, the Chinese English newspapers collocate foreign with more various kinds of nouns.Unexpectedly, the native English newspapers use fewer types of nouns.Thus, in terms of the meaning of foreign, it is assumed that the native English newspapers might replace foreign with other words to express the similar meaning.So in the next step, a comparison on the most frequent collocations of foreign will be made between CEC and AEC.

Specific Analysis of the Top Ten Most Frequent Collocations of FOREIGN in CENC and AENC
As discussed before, the collocations foreign exchange(s), foreign minister(s), foreign ministry/ministries, foreign policy/policies, foreign affair(s) and foreign investor(s) appear in the top ten frequent collocation lists in both corpora.In these high frequent collocations, except for the fixed phrase foreign exchange which means a system of buying and selling, the word foreign in the other five collocations is defined in Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary (Hornby, 2005) as follows: 1. of, in or from a country or an area other than one's own; 2. dealing with or involving other countries.
However, as mentioned before, CEN's top three most frequent collocations foreign company/companies, foreign country/countries, and foreign trade, are rarely seen in AEC.Why do native English newspapers seldom use these collocations?According to Chamber Maxi Paperback Dictionary (Schwarz, 1992), foreign has other definitions: alien; extraneous; not belonging; unconnected; not appropriate.
Apparently, the meanings have a derogative tincture, which can be found in the following example in AEC: But this small, working-class neighborhood, known for its sometimes kitschy embrace of Old World pride, seems determined to restore a connection with a country few of its residents have visited, a language that fewer speak, and a culture that has already grown increasingly foreign.The sentence above is taken from a news report: Reclaiming An Identity Washed Out In A Flood in New York Times on March 20, 2011, which is about a small Czech community living in Iowa and trying to protect their own culture from disappearing.Considering the context of this news report, "foreign" means that the Czech culture has become strange when people have lost the sense of belonging to their own culture.
From the example above, it can be seen that native English newspapers sometimes use foreign with negative connotations, while in CEC the researchers cannot find such kinds of usage.This is one of the differences on the use of foreign between the two corpora in terms of the word's semantic meaning.In the next step, the researchers will continue to analyze another difference on the use of foreign between CEC and AEC.

Specific Analysis of the Frequent Collocations of FOREIGN unique in CEC
As mentioned before, in CEC, the collocations foreign company/companies, foreign country/countries, and foreign trade are widely used, while in AEC they are rarely seen.So, here come the questions: why do Chinese English newspapers overuse these collocations?What other expressions do native English newspapers use when they want to express similar meanings?The following part will focus on the above questions and make a specific analysis of these three collocations.
1.The first collocation is "foreign company/companies", which refers to companies that belong to other countries or companies with investments by other countries in China.In China, "foreign company/companies" has become a common phrase after 1978 due to economic policies.From then on, companies from developed countries flooded into China to develop new markets.The large amount of foreign capital brought by these companies has greatly boosted China's economy.Since then, "foreign company/companies", which is the English translation of the Chinese term "waiguo gongsi"or "waizi gongsi", has been widely used around China.But such a popular phrase is rarely found in AEC.
In order to get more details, the researchers study the synonyms of company: firm and corporation, to see whether there are "foreign firm/firms" or "foreign corporation/corporations" used in AENC.The searching result displays one for "foreign firms".Therefore, it is clear that native English news reports seldom use this collocation.After trying another search words for the similar meaning with "foreign company/companies" in AEC, the researchers get 3 instances of "international firms", 3 instances of "international company/companies", and 1 instance of "international corporations", which have similar meaning to "foreign company/companies".According to Collins Cobuild Dictionary (Sinclair, 2000), "international" is defined as "between or involving different countries".Clearly, this definition is neutral, and by referring to other dictionaries, the researchers get similar definitions.Thus it is easy to understand why native English newspapers prefer to use "international".2. The second collocation is "foreign country/countries" in CEC, which cannot be found in AEC.So how do native English newspapers express the same meaning?the researchers search for the frequent collocations of "country/countries" in AENC, and find that there are 30 "other country/countries" used to express the same meaning.It seems that "other country/countries" might have less subjective bias.3.As for "foreign trade", the researchers find that there are several similar expressions in CEC.They are "international trade", "global trade", "multilateral trade", and "world trade".However, in AEC, there are only 3 instances of "international trade", which might be a substitution for "foreign trade".The cause of overuse of "foreign trade" is similar to the case of "foreign company/companies".With the rapid development of economy and new technology in China, especially the One Belt, One Road Initiative, international trade has become very popular among countries, which, to some extent, leads to the overuse of "foreign trade" in China.
After the above analysis of "foreign company/companies", "foreign country/countries" and "foreign trade", the current study concludes that there are external and internal factors which lead to the overuse of these collocations.As to the external factors, the Reform and Opening-up policy allows other countries' investments in China, and the Chinese people may have greater chances to know more about "foreign" things and use this word based on these cross-border economic activities.For the internal factors, they may come from a linguistic perspective.In Chinese English dictionaries, the word foreign does not suggest anything negative.However, in some native English dictionaries, this word has negative meanings.

Possible Causes of the Results
The possible reasons for the overuse of foreign in Chinese English newspapers might be explained from the two perspectives.
Social background is considered as the first reason.It is well known that China nowadays has much more frequent contact with other countries in many fields, especially in the areas of economy and culture.Since there are much exchange and international cooperation with the outside world, the Chinese phrase "waiguo" (other countries), which is translated as "foreign", is commonly seen in Chinese mass media when they describe the things dealing with or involving other countries.As a result, the wider the Chinese phrase "waiguo" is used, the more frequently foreign might appear in Chinese English newspapers, hence the overuse of it.
The second reason is explained from the linguistic perspective.In most English-Chinese bilingual dictionaries, the first definition of foreign is "waiguode", which does not carry any negative meaning.After studying all the collocational patterns of foreign in CEC, the researchers found that foreign is mostly used in the first definition.That is to say, Chinese English newspapers focus on the core meaning of foreign while overlooking its other meanings.Thus, the current study can conclude that the lack of all-round understanding of foreign may result in its overuse in Chinese English news reports.

PEDAGOGICAL IMPLICATIONS
The major findings are summarized as follows: Firstly, Chinese English newspapers tend to use foreign more frequently than English native newspapers and they focus on the neutral meaning of foreign while neglecting its derogative meanings.Secondly, Chinese English newspapers use foreign in more variety of situations to express the meaning of between or involving different countries, while English native newspapers use international to express the similar meaning.
These findings bring some pedagogical implications for English teaching in China.
Firstly English teaching should call the learners' attention to the all-round meaning of foreign, especially its derogative meaning; Secondly learner should be made aware to use more appropriate word like international to express the intended meaning in some situations.Lastly but least, English learner can be taught to use native English corpus to guide their writing.Textbooks and handbooks can offer the meanings and usage of the English words, but there is little guidance as to how often and in what specific situations they should use these words to be able to approximate good native English writing.A large collection of native English corpus and software such as AntCont used in this study, makes complements for the textbooks.While the concordance from the learner corpus provides the actual illustration for the learners' typical problems, the concordance from the native corpus provides resources of reference when the teachers or learners need information concerning the actual use of the focused usage by the native English speakers.

First
of all, AntCon3.4.3 is used to search the top ten collocations of foreign in CENC and AENC.The top ten collocations of foreign in CENC and AENC are listed in the following table.

Figure 3 .
Figure 3.The Way Log-likelihood Calculator Works

Figure 4 .
Figure 4.The Way Log-likelihood Calculator Works

Table 1 .
The Descriptive Data of the Two Corpora Used in the Present Study EURASIA J Math Sci and Tech Ed

Table 2 .
Overall Frequencies of FOREIGN in CENC and AENC Figure 1.Log-likelihood Calculator Figure 2. Log-likelihood Calculator Results of FOREIGN

Table 3 .
The Top Ten Collocations of Adjective FOREIGN