Western English Composition Studies In A Metadisciplinary Perspective

In its broad sense, Western English Composition Studies covers composition studies of English ranging from as a first and a second language to as a foreign language while in its narrow sense, it only refers to Western English Composition Studies as a contemporary discipline conventionally dated to 1963 and established in the two-year colleges and universities in North America. And this dissertation mainly focuses on the latter one. Being a humanistic discipline, English Composition Studies has become characterized with some features of social sciences after its social turn happened in 1980s and thus evolved into an interdisciplinary and multimodal field.In today's globalized postmodern context, Western English Composition Studies is facing great challenges of multiculturalism and diverse ideologies, which have brought about a lot of issues to be identified within its current disciplinary research. Therefore, in order to promote its development in the twenty-first century, it is necessary to make a study of it in a metadisciplinary perspective.This dissertation aims to make clear the development of the scholarly thoughts of Western English Composition Studies so as to improve the English composition instruction in China. So a metadisciplinary study of this field has been presented in this dissertation. First, one of the main source disciplines of Western English Composition Studies, that is, Western Classical Rhetoric, has been traced. Then, the development and changes of Western English Composition Studies have been studied. Furthermore, its interdisciplinary theoretical matrixes have been constructed and competing paradigms have been argued with their shifts demonstrated. And all these studies have been made to help improve English composition instruction in China.In this dissertation, based on interdisciplinary theories involving Western Classical Rhetoric, Western English Composition Studies, philosophy, cognitive psychology, literary criticism and discourse analysis and so on, a large amount of historical data together with theoretical and empirical scholarship concerning English Composition Studies have been surveyed. And multimodal methods have been devised integrating both humanistic research methods such as history, contrast analysis, description and interpretation and those of social sciences, for example, case study, so as to construct the metatheories of Western English Composition Studies.And all the above-mentioned studies have led to the following conclusions:(1) As a discipline, Western English Composition Studies mainly originated from Western Classical Rhetoric and was established in the nineteenth-century America with some educational movements, focusing on how to write and read situated written discourses. And it was closely related to the development of the existing society,economy, politics and technology and was in accordance with the goal of the democratic education in America from the 1980s to the early twentieth century.(2)And English Composition Studies is a humanistic discipline with interdisciplinary theoretical matrixes including Western Rhetoric, English Studies, linguistics, cognitive psychology, literary criticism, sociology, philosophy, and education and so on while its research methods are multimodal, combined with such humanistic research methods as interpretive and historical ones as well as social research methods like those of ethnography, case study, protocol analysis, interview, corpus and so on.(3) ESL/EFL Composition Studies have been derived from applied linguistics and composition studies of English as a native language. And ESL Composition Studies has been recognized as a discipline in 1990s, namely Second Language Writing (SLW). These three fields of composition studies should and can be integrated together, for they are closely related with each other in an interactive way. Especially, due to its inadequate research, EFL Composition Studies, i.e., Foreign Language Writing (FLW) should be studied based on various local cultural contexts, drawing on scholarship from the other two fields.(4) Currently, there still exist competing paradigms and research methods in Western English Composition Studies. The Current-traditional rhetoric is still in action up to now while the Process Pedagogies are the most prevalent since 1980. Now that there are so many strands with various theoretical foundations and pedagogies concerning composing process, the process paradigm as a whole has already been questioned. While the Post-process Movement emphasizes the social perspective of compositions, it is still a diversified paradigm with discursive theories.Though a comparatively systematic study of Western English Composition Studies has been presented in a metadisciplinary perspective in this dissertation, there are still some other important aspects of it ignored , such as the metatheories concerning its research methods and methodologies, other theoretical matrixes, pedagogies, SLW and EFL writing, etc.. Besides, how to improve the above-mentioned studies and how to apply the metadisciplinary theories of Western English Composition Studies to the practice of composition instruction in China deserve a further study in the future.Aiming to guide English composition instruction and improve students'English literacy, Western English Composition Studies is inspiring and applicable to both English reading and English-Chinese translation studies as well, due to the intense interaction between reading and writing activities and that translation is closely related to composition. Besides, generally speaking, English Composition, Linguistics and Literature are three main subjects in an English department both at home and abroad. Therefore it is beneficial to integrate them together properly in order to improve the development of students'literacy and qualities more effectively.