Study Of Grammatical Metaphor In English Writing For Chinese College Students

English writing is a rather difficult skill to acquire. The present study makes an attempt to solve this problem from the perspective of Halliday's grammatical metaphor.By using the ideational grammatical metaphor, interpersonal grammatical metaphor, and nominalization under the theory, the teaching experiment was designed in the thesis. Also the author applied a variety of flexible teaching methods into the teaching experiment, aiming at finding out approaches to help students to acquire better College English writing skills.The subjects of this study are 160 second-year non-English majors in Xi'an Technological University. The students came from four natural classes, two of which were planned as the experimental group of 80 students; the other two, as the controlled one of 80. All these 160 of 2 groups are majoring in optoelectronics and in mechanics respectively. The experiment was conducted from March to June of 2010 in the experimental group. The main jobs in the study were the classroom teaching, the teaching materials accumulating, the questionnaires, the pre-test and post-test, etc. The results from the statistics and analyses by SPSS 17.0 indicated:before the experiment, majority of the students conceived little on the correlations and effects for College English writing by the grammatical metaphor; most of them thought that the writing was a hardest task; during the classroom work, the experimental group was cultivated English thinking abilities with the ideational grammatical metaphor, helping them freely exchange sentence forms; the interpersonal grammatical metaphor developed the students'discourse cohesion abilities, and the nominalization enhanced their accuracy and formality in their word choices. After the 4 months'research, both the interest and confidence of the experimental group were greatly strengthened. And the scores of the pre-test and post-test said:prior the experiment, the average and the standard deviation of experimental group and the controlled one were almost equal. But after it, a big gap appeared:the former advanced from 6.50 to 7.70 (the full score,15); the latter, from 6.56 to 6.88.It is clear that, through this teaching research, a dared design and operation for a reform in College English writing under Halliday's grammatical metaphor is feasible and effective. And a combination of grammatical metaphor and normal teaching of College English writing shows exploring and promoting significance, and it is worth advocating. Anyway, this research inevitably left some problems, such as how to heighten students'theoretical level, how to make theory and practice into one, etc. Surely all these problems will be solved in the further researches.