Effects Of Different Thinking Modes On English Writing By Chinese Students

It is necessary to shed light on native speakers' favorite writing styles which are highly influenced by the different cultural orientations if learners want to communicate effectively with them in writing. Writing English in the English way has been a skill that most Chinese EFL students find difficult to master.It is reported that there is a great demand for improving college students' English writing performance as most companies and institutes are not content with their Sometimes even though the words and sentences are quite clear, it seems that the writer's main point is not clear enough. Research on discourse shows that the confusion in goals or in interpreting the main point of another's speech is caused by the fact that each side is using different principles of discourse to organize its presentations.Thinking and discourse organizational patterns are highly influenced by their cultural roots. Thus language is closely related to its specific culture.The relationship between language and culture has been a focus of attention from a variety of disciplinary perspectives for many years. One of the best-known statements is the Sapir-Whorf's hypothesis: there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.Kaplan (1966) was the first author to develop a deterministic hypothesis, suggesting that people from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds organize discourse differently as a reflection of their native language and culture. These hypotheses stated by Kaplan transferred the traditional Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from the broader area of second-language learning into the specific application of literacy development.In order to further explore how Chinese EFL learners' writing is influenced by the thinking modes of their mother tongue, the author conducted a case study and then put forward some suggestions to bridge the gap of the cultural thinking patterns between English and Chinese.