Centering Theory In Realization Of The 3～(rd) Person Pronouns And Names As Anaphor In Discourse Coherence In Chinese EFL Students' English Narrative Writin

The research reported here presents an initial attempt to apply the basic ideas from centering theory to studying how Chinese senior school and college EFL students use the third person pronouns and names as anaphor in English narrative or descriptive writing to achieve discourse cohesion and coherence. Centering theory is believed to provide an account of ways in which patterns of interutterance or sentence reference can promote the local coherence of discourse. Our concern in this study is to see whether centering theory can be used to explain the realization of the third person pronoun in achieving discourse coherence.According to centering theory, the principle in this study to measure coherence is that a pronoun is used when the CONTINE of the center moves on; a name is used when SHIFT occurs. Three distinctive factors are reported to help resolve the ambiguity of the third person pronoun as anaphor in reading literature review. They are discourse focus, lexical information in the pronoun and pragmatic inference or world knowledge associated with the verb. Do these factors help to experiment participants realize the third person pronoun as anaphor instead of a name in English writing? This is what we want to investigate in this study.The participants in this research consist of 30 American native speakers who serve as contrast group, 30 college students majoring in English and 30 high school students. They are instructed to do the writing task, which is designed in the form of combining individual sentences into a short coherent discourse segment. In order to check whether Chinese EFL students are influenced by their mother tongue, they are required to do another task of linking up Chinese sentences into a short coherent discourse segment.The results of the experiment show that the Chinese EFL students' realization of the third person pronouns and names as anaphor in achieving discourse coherence is in conformity with the tenets of centering theory and there is no striking difference in the use of the third person pronouns and names as anaphor in achieving discourse coherence in English narrative writing between participants in control group andexperimental group. Some statistical differences in this study are attributed to the ways of connecting individual sentences into a coherent discourse segment between English L1 speakers and Chinese EFL learners.Some limitations are pointed out and some suggestions are put forth for future research at the end of the thesis.