Font Size: a A A

Textuality And College English Writing

Posted on:2007-03-06Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:J F HuangFull Text:PDF
GTID:2155360182497243Subject:English Language and Literature
Abstract/Summary:PDF Full Text Request
It is known that one of the objectives of English teaching is to cultivate students'writing ability. However, for a long time, it has been hard for teachers and collegestudents in China. And in teaching practice, the research on English writing has neverstopped. At present, the product approach and process approach are among the mostprevailing approaches in the teaching of English writing. Yet, they are difficult toimplement in the current situations of English teaching, for the former only stressesthe product—the final writing, thus is of little effect in improving English writing.The latter which emphasizes the writing process is time-consuming. In fact, it hasbeen a common phenomenon that most compositions written by students lacktextuality. Therefore, to improve students' textuality in English writing becomes aproblem demanding prompt solution. The two prevailing teaching approaches inwriting cannot work out the problem well. Nowadays, more and more attention hasbeen paid to text in linguistics as well as in EFLT. Text is formed not only by thesingle sentences in the text, but also by other factors that make it a text. The mostimportant factors are textuality or texture, which is the basic characteristic that peoplefollow in encoding and decoding a text. And how to distinguish text from non-textalso depends on textuality, which is the determinant factor in a text. In Introduction toText Linguistic, Beaugrande & Dressler (1981) propose that a typical text shouldcontain the following seven criteria of textuality: cohesion, coherence, intentionality,acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality.Based on the seven standards of textuality advocated by Beaugrande & Dressler,and synthesizing merits of the product and process approaches, the author aims tocarry out the teaching experiment by textuality-oriented teaching approach. In thethesis, the feasibility of textuality-oriented teaching approach in writing course isexplored, and relations between the standards of textuality and college English writingare also discussed and analyzed. Two hypotheses are proposed before the beginning ofthe experiment: the null hypothesis—applying textuality teaching will have noinfluence on the writing of college students;the alternative hypothesis— teaching oftextuality can help students improve their writing performance, and students havingreceived textuality training perform better than those without the training.The subjects are 60 non-English freshmen from two intact classes in GeographyDepartment in Shandong Institute of Architecture and Engineering. Their NMETmarks are from 98 to 108. The students in Class 1 are randomly assigned toExperiment Group (EG) and those in Class 2 are Control Group (CG). T-tests bySPSS 12.0 are used to make an overall check of the writing performance bothbetween and across EG and CG to carry out the statistical analysis. Moreover, in orderto obtain further information to explain why and how students in EG improve theirwriting scores, a semi-open interview is employed to make a specific descriptiveanalysis on the quantity and quality of the textuality features in students' papers.Students in EG and CG reveal they do not differ significantly in pretest concerningtextuality (they all know very little about textuality), but they do differ significantly atthe end of the study. Students in EG having received training of textuality makestatistically higher scores and produce much better compositions than those in CGwho are taught according to the traditional teaching method. Generally speaking,results of t tests and interview altogether demonstrate convincingly that instructionsabout textuality in non-English majors' writing class facilitate students' progress intheir papers. Therefore, the alternative hypothesis that teaching standards of textualitycan contribute to improving writing ability is confirmed.The thesis is composed of four chapters. Chapter One is literature review aboutthe study on textuality and EFL/ESL writing at home and abroad. On the basis of theprevious studies mentioned above, the author proposes the importance and necessityof the tentative approach—textuality-oriented teaching approach. Chapter Two is thetheoretical framework. The discussions of the seven standards of textuality are mainlybased on Beaugrande & Dressler's. The investigation of textuality in students'compositions is made in Chapter Three which consists of pretest, posttest and theinterview about students' textuality in writing so that the results can shed light oncollege EFL writing in China. Some textual failures in students' compositions areanalyzed by examples and the underlying reasons are also explored. Enlightened bythe teaching experiment, some pedagogical implications are presented in ChapterFour.The textuality-oriented teaching approach in English writing is both theoreticallysound and practically feasible. In addition, the results of this study turn out to beinspiring and constructive in English teaching. However, there are still somelimitations, for it is a tentative study and the small sample size as well, to some extent,limits the generalization of the findings. Therefore, further study is needed in thefuture.
Keywords/Search Tags:textuality, standards of textuality, textuality-oriented teaching approach, college English writing
PDF Full Text Request
Related items