A Study On Rhetorical Features Of Chinese Students’ Eflnarrative Writing

Narrative is one of the most basic genres. It is cultural-specific and rhetoricalfeatures in EFL narrative writing carry the richest information about one culture. Thisstudy is aimed at discovering rhetorical features in Chinese students’ EFL narrativewritings by collecting and analyzing English narrative writings from Chinese EFLstudents. After102writings from Chinese students were collected, a small corpus wasbuilt to provide data source for the analysis. After that, the corpus was analyzed by theresearcher to see the rhetorical structures (Labov and Waletzky,1967), rhetoricalgrammar (Burke,1969) and how cohesive devices (Halliday and Hasan,2001) were usedin writings by Chinese EFL students.Eventually, the study found that Chinese students preferred the rhetorical structure oforientation-complication-evaluation-resolution-coda, and structural elements likeorientation, complication and resolution were unanimously used by Chinese EFLstudents in their narrative writings. Meanwhile, Chinese EFL students used more indirectstatements or they used no dialogues at all in their EFL narrative writings. Besides,Chinese students provided little information about the background of the narration. Theydescribed little about the scene, and the agents (especially the names of agents). As to theuse of cohesive devices, Chinese EFL students tended to overuse first-person pronouns,which resembled language habits in Chinese language. Moreover, Chinese EFL studentsapplied an excessive number of demonstrative references including “this”,“that” and“the”, which took up89.43%of all demonstrative references used. Besides, Chinese EFLstudents rarely used substitution and ellipsis in their narrative writings. However, theyused25conjunctions in each1000words in the corpus, with a obsessive preference for“and”,“besides” and “moreover” as additive conjunctions,“but” and “however” asadversative conjunction, and “because”,“so” as causal conjunctions. Meanwhile,79.4% Chinese EFL students used lexical cohesion with reiteration taking up73.53%of alllexical cohesion used in the corpus.