A Semiotic Study Of English Composition-Rhetoric

With economic globalization and highly-advanced networks, written communication has become one of the core competencies at present. The ability to communicate ideas and information effectively through the global digital network is crucially dependent on good writing skills. Command of good writing skills is increasingly viewed as vital to equip learners for success in the twenty-first century. Writing ability in second languages (SL) or foreign languages (FL) is directly related to the students'employment and future development. Learning how to write effectively in SL/FL is one of the most challenging aspects of SL/FL learning. Since writing is a kind of activity integrated with language ability, social ability and problem-solving ability, more and more scholars have attempted to understand and interpret this complicated mental activity from different perspectives.In the latter half of the 20th century in the West, writing theories went through a developing stage from"written product"through"writing process"to"metacognition"and"social cognition". Successively there appeared the teaching pedagogies about product, process, context and social cognition. In recent years, ESL writing has been a much more independent discipline----some scholars have started to reflect on its history, reexamine the basic assumptions about ESL writing and writing instruction, synthesize their researches, and build some models and theories. The scholars have inherited and borrowed the rich fruits in first language writing and rhetoric, and other related fields, and have made a lot of fruitful researches integrated with the actual situations of ESL writing. At present, the scholars are making a deeper study of ESL writing and instruction.However, despite the noticeable achievements made in English composition studies abroad, according to the above analysis, a comprehensive theory of L2 writing---- an integrated theoretical system still lacks in this field abroad. At present, this field lacks a coherent understanding of how people actually learn to write in a second language and how teaching contributes to this learning. It has become a consensus among relevant researchers that a practical and effective writing pedagogy should combine all the major approaches to writing in an organic way.In recent years, the Chinese scholars have begun to focus on the research into this field. The studies in ESL composition and instruction have transformed from the introduction and application of theories to the innovation of theories and have borne rich fruit in China. Some scholars have set out to carry out researches and discussions in this field from different angles and in various ways: content, methodology, developmental trend.The actual situation in China is that the depth and breadth of ESL/EFL composition studies need to be further expanded; the plentiful research findings are scattered and lack systematicity; the efficiency in teaching of English composition remains to be improved. The solution to the problems is that we should not copy the given foreign theoretical models, but use different methods according to the specific situations in China, have a synthetic analysis of the existing isolated research findings in order to reveal the essential characteristics and common laws of the Chinese learners of English composition, and eventually establish the ESL/EFL composition theories adapted to Chinese realities. However, all of these require us to explore constantly this field, renew our ideas and convert our perspectives.Studies show that semiotics is both a kind of theory that interprets social-cultural phenomena, and a kind of methodology. Contemporary semioticians study signs not in isolation but as part of semiotic sign systems. They study how meanings are made: as such, being concerned not only with communication but also with the construction and maintenance of reality. Semiotics supplies people with a new thinking mode, which can be used to analyze some phenomena or problems in the fields of linguistics, literature, culture, politics, economics, art, news communication, etc. Rich semiotic theories constitute a great theoretical treasure-house, from which how to obtain an effective methodology to settle some problems in ESL/EFL composition rhetoric is a new question for study.Initiated at the beginning of the 20th century, upsurging in the 30s and 40s, and thriving up to the present, semiotics has moved beyond the structuralist concern with the internal relations of parts within a self-contained system, from structural semiotics and interpretative semiotics to cultural semiotics and social semiotics, seeking to explore the use of signs in specific social situations. In this course, semiotics has always been involved in two kinds of research activities: one is the incessant exploration into the basic theories of semiotics; the other is the concrete analyses carried out in various fields of research, incorporating all these findings into the same framework of methodology, and regarding them as different representations of the generation, transmission and interpretation of meanings. Semiotics plays the role of"organizing science"for different disciplines, while these disciplines constitute the actual application of semiotics.A semiotic text analysis scrutinizes the various signs in the text in an attempt to characterize their structure and identify potential meanings, especially socio-cultural meanings. Semiotics seeks to analyze texts as structured wholes, involving identifying the components within the semiotic system (such as word, context or genre), and the structural relations between these components (such as syntagmatic, paradigmatic or logical relations). Semiotics stresses the semiotic structures and relations both within and outside the sign system, and their interactions. Semiotics adopts a multimodal and interdisciplinary analytic methodology.Semiotics emphasizes the rule system which plays a dominant role in the text, and the semiotic context in which meaning is formed. The production and interpretation of the text depend on communicative codes or communicative rules, because the meaning of the sign pivots on the codes where the sign lie. The code provides the frame of meaning generation and interpretation. This frame can be used both by the text producer and by the text interpreter. When constructing the text, we usually choose the codes which we are familiar with, and link them so that the meaning produced by the codes can be interpreted by the reader. Every text is a system of signs organized according to codes and subcodes which reflect certain values, attitudes, beliefs, assumptions and practices. However, ESL/EFL writers, because they are not familiar with the coded program of the used language, wrongly encode the text so that it is difficult for the reader to understand the text, causing the intercultural shock.Writing deals with the production of the text and semioticity is one of the important characteristics in text. Creating a text involves relating it to relevant signs and codes. Codes are not simply conventions of communication, but rather procedural systems of related conventions. Codes organize signs into meaningful systems which correlate signifiers and signifieds. Codes transcend single texts, linking them together in an interpretative framework. Composition-rhetoric, the art of using codes effectively to organize signs to form the text, studies all kinds of rhetorical phenomena in writing, which it treats as special ways to construct and maintain the text through signs and codes. Composition-rhetoric is concerned with diction, figures of speech, topic, context, rhetorical situation, rhetorical strategies, rhetorical structure, cohesion, coherence, style, and genre, etc. All of them can be regarded as codes, which organize signs to help us to discover the world and ourselves, and to construct the text. Writing involves mental as well as physical activity, involves readers, texts as well as writers, including culture. Semiotics helps us to discover and interpret these processes of semiotic interaction not only within and but also outside the text. It extends and broadens this area of inquiry to even a non-linguistic perspective when dealing with ESL/EFL writing.To sum up, semiotics studies the substantive characteristics and the mode of operation of the sign. A given text is a sign, which operates within the text and is of specific semantic functions. The meaning generation of the sign rests with the practical application, which must proceed within the text and works in a given society and culture. This point stands out clearly in ESL/EFL writing. Thus, ESL/EFL writers should cultivate their own semiotic competence, that is, the ability of how to use signs and codes to know, to interpret and to construct the world.The objectives of this dissertation are: 1) This study, with semiotic theories as analysis tools, adopts an across-disciplinary research methodology. It makes a pioneering attempt to explore the distinctive rhetorical features in constructing EFL/ESL written texts both linguistically and culturally, to combine fruitful findings in such disciplines as rhetoric, text linguistics, contrastive rhetoric, informatics, communication studies, intercultural communication and cognitive linguistics, etc, and to make a qualitative and empirical analysis of all aspects of English composition-rhetoric. Its final goal is to find some solutions to the problems of ESL/EFL composition, and to make up for the deficiency of being isolated and lacking systematicity of ESL/EFL composition theories; 2) This study attempts to combine semiotic theories with English composition-rhetoric in order for ESL/EFL writers and teachers to cast a new light on English writing. It is hoped that this study can help ESL/EFL writers and teachers better understand the meaning generation of English texts, discover some rules and methods of English composition-rhetoric, foster their ability in rhetoric and communication, and improve their English writing and teaching; 3) By interpreting the semiotic theories and by analyzing various structures and relations within and outside the text, this study explains the relationship between semiotics and composition-rhetoric, provides a new perspective on ESL/EFL writing studies, adds a new methodology to assess and analyze ESL/EFL written texts, and makes up for the insufficiency of the theory and research in ESL/EFL writing.Just like other tentative researches, there exists much room for improvement in this study, and especially the quantitative analysis merits application and further discussion in the future.