A Study Of The Paragraph Rhetorical Structure Of Chinese Students' English Expository Writing

Writing and rhetoric are not only a linguistic activity, but also a cultural activity. Chinese and English rhetorical structures are always shaped by their respective cultures. Influenced by their own cultural thought patterns, the paragraph rhetorical structures are different in Chinese and English essays. For example, English paragraph movement is to be direct and adopts deductive strategy, while Chinese writing is indirect or circular and adopts inductive strategy.Based on the contrastive rhetoric theory, that is, the native language and culture influence one's writing in a second language, this study adopts sample analysis and questionnaire to examine whether the negative transfer of the Chinese paragraph rhetorical structure exists in the English writing of Chinese students, what causes the negative transfer, and how to improve Chinese students'discourse competence. This study includes two parts: (1) 50 non-English majors'expositions are investigated in a way in which the paragraphs in isolation and each whole essay are researched from the three areas: (i) opening paragraphs, (ii) paragraph movements, (iii) topic sentences; (2) The answers to two questionnaires are analyzed to mainly study students'writing problems from the angle of teaching and learning. The research indicates that only 10 percent of compositions follow the English opening pattern, 21.7 percent of 115 paragraphs (except the opening paragraphs) follow English deductive movement, 50.4 percent of the paragraphs have no topic sentences, and fewer than 40 percent of the topic sentence are indirect in the...