Astudy On English Rhetorical Text Pattern For Students In Xinjiang Normal University

English writhing plays an important role in college English teaching. It is regarded as one of important and difficult skills for Chinese students to master. Expect for the problem with vocabulary and grammar, many students'writings are rated as"out of focus","lacking organization and cohesion". Students'ability in text organization is still relatively weak. In recent years, a great number of linguists and researchers have noticed that Chinese students are not familiar with the English text patterns and English conventions, which results in their unacceptable writings for English native speakers.Contrastive rhetoric began as an effort to improve L2 writing, and it moved ahead to compare discourse structures across cultures and genres. It has aroused great interest in the study of EFL/ESL writing. Text linguistics development as a relatively new approach for CR provides it with new, valid, and reliable ways for the text analysis. Cohesion, coherence and text pattern are three aspects of it. A majority of studies on cohesion and coherence have been conducted, but there are relatively less research has been done on text pattern, besides in the aspect to consider rhetorical strategies which adopted by the Han and the Uyghur students in Xinjiang. The current study will provide a new research direction in this area.On the basis of the previous empirical researches on English text linguistics, the purpose of this study aims to describe the features of English text patterns and rhetorical strategies used by EFL students in Xinjiang Normal University (30 Han students and 30"Min Kaohan"Uyghur students are chosen) with two levels of students (30 English majors and 60 non-English majors) at three stages. In order to guarantee the reliability of the research, the results of three stages are classified to form the basic data for statistics and discussion in SPSS. 16.0 (Ð¥2 test is used ). By analyzing, the author finds that there is a same tendency in using rhetorical strategies to form the text patterns between the Han and the Uyghur students, which are different from the English native speakers. The major findings of the current research are: 1. Most students could meet three paragraphs'outline requirement by using some transitional words like"firstly","secondly", and"finally"to compose their compositions, however, this kind of meet is still a mechanical three parts of"linear pattern".2. There are no remarkable differences between the Han and the Uyghur students("Min Kaohan")in using of text patterns. Students are still not familiar with English rhetorical conventions. With the highest percentage of applying Problem-Solution Pattern, the mixed text patterns and no clear text pattern all appeared in the two groups of learners.3. Indirect way of Chinese rhetorical strategies was adopted in the students'writings, which loosely developed the topic or without any clear topic statement in each paragraphs.The answers to these problems could be explained as the influence of Chinese conventions, cultural differences between two languages, limitation in language teaching could be another factor. The results of the similarities between the Han and the Uyghur students might be caused by their special learning background, which is a period of time for the Uyghurs to acquire a good knowledge of Chinese in Han school before they come to learn English. Chinese as a bridge between their mother tongue and the target language English affect them in some way before they receive a newer culture-- English.In the end, the author emphasizes that the results and findings in the current research may provide a theoretical implication which could inform EFL/ESL college teaching with more thinking. Due to the limitation of the present research, the author also puts forward some suggestions for the further study.