This study is a comparative research based on corpus. This article compares China's English learners with English na?tive speakers about the use of "at last" and "in the end" from three aspects: frequency of use, location, semantic prosody. The study shows that the use of the two words are greatly different between China's English learners and English native speakers. In addition, this study discusses about causes of obvious differences and teaching enlightenments.
The introduction of the academic paper, as a type of discourse, are not only an indispensable part of the thesis, but also a kind of social behavior with communicative purpose. The introductions are the essence of academic papers, so it is particularly important for postgraduates to write English introduction. Therefore, the introduction of academic writing, as a genre, has been widely studied for many years. This study analyzes a 50-research-article corpus of English introductions chosen at random with theories relating to genre and genre analysis. These research articles from masters' graduation thesis in the field of applied linguistics(Research Article, i.e. for RA) are analyzed from macro-level and micro-level. And this study is to explore English postgraduates how to choose genre structure, language forms and the communicative purpose that the introductions should achieve. The result shows that some English introductions of the masters' graduation thesis differ from the international general pattern in frequency and quantity of moves, due to the influence of the context. To some extent, this study is significant in teaching academic paper writing.
