A Study Of Textual Metafunction Application In Chinese College Students' English Writing

For many years a central concern for EFL writing instruction has been how to achieve textuality (namely coherence), which most linguists or researchers study mainly from the aspect of cohesion, thus grammatical (conjunction especially) and lexical cohesions have long been a heated topic. However, cohesion is only one of the three integrated systems of textual metafunction, the other two being thematic structure and information structure. Theoretically, cohesion, thematic structure and information structure combine together to contribute to the coherence of English compositions (Halliday and Hasan, 1976).Thematic structure refers to the organizational pattern of theme and rheme, with theme always at the beginning of a sentence. Generally, a text consists of many sentences, thus a coherent text should require the theme and rheme in the following sentences have some connection with those in the former ones. This connection is realized through thematic progression. And information in a text is composed of given information and new information and information theory characteristically requires a speaker (or writer) place the given information before the new, which aids reader's understanding of a passage as it accords with the readers' cognition process of moving from things they know about to those they do not (Halliday, 1994). Both of the two structures are new to either EFL students or their teachers while lexical cohesion and conjuncts are often applied in students' writing practice.In order to see Chinese EFL students' application of thematic structure, information structure, lexical cohesion and conjuncts in their writings, an attempt is made in this thesis to examine the following four questions: (1) Do Chinese college students know a lot about thematic structure and information structure? (2) Do Chinese college students make many mistakes (or confusion) of thematic structure or information structure? (3) Do Chinese college students apply a lot of lexical cohesions or conjunctions? (4) Do Chinese college students apply lexical cohesions or conjunctions of various kinds?...