Toward A Systemic Functional Approach To Cultivating Non-English Majors' Writing Ability

Nowadays, most writing courses incorporate work designed to help learners grasp the cohesive devices of written English: reference, substitution ellipsis, conjunctions, and so forth. However, L2 writing instructors still come across ESL student compositions in which sentences, assessed in isolation, are grammatically correct and yet the overall effect is incoherent.Halliday's Systemic Functional Linguistics has long been applied to writing, especially the textual functions, which largely include cohesion system as well as Theme-Rheme system. However, reviewing recent literature work, which contributed to the teaching of L2 writing, we can see that the research is usually closely linked to the cohesive ties (Halliday, 1976). Research work on choice of theme and information arrangement is neglected in achieving coherent writing.The present study is an effort to apply cohesion theory, thematic structure and information structure to practical issues in second language writing to explore the effective ways of furthering students' writing ability. It is divided into two stages. The objective of the first stage is to test to what extent cohesive-error patterning affects the quality of writing by making a comparison of cohesive error patterns between good and poor compositions of Chinese college seniors (non-English majors). As a result, Halliday's five categories of cohesive ties fail to confirm that any of them is sufficient to distinguish good from poor writing. By further analysis, we find simple repetition in lexical ties is the main factor that leads to variation in writing quality between two groups. Furthermore, the coherence error analysis show us that the main factors which affect the quality of writing is lack of awareness of topic sentence, text organization and information arrangement in a text.The objective of the second stage is to try four types of possible exercises related to thematic structure and information structure, and show how they can be exploited to provide for greater coherence in our students' compositions. These approaches concern(l)Avoiding repetition by learning words in context; (2) Writing a typical topic-sentence paragraph; (3) Understanding the concept of Theme development; and (4) Understanding information structure and highlighting information focus. We find that they are proved to be very helpful as a tool of instruction at the level of discourse for the writing teacher.