Using RST To Analyze Discourse Relations In College Students' Argumentative Compositions

Writing as one of the basic language skills is an indispensable part of the language teaching. Among different types of writing, argumentative teaching is the most challenging one to the teachers. Students also have a lot of problems like incoherent structure or unconvincing evidence in composing them.Based on Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, RST), the thesis studies argumentative compositions and aims at answering the following questions: (1) Is there any relationship between RST as a cohesive device and textual coherence? (2) What are the differences and similarities between good and poor argumentative compositions in terms of rhetorical analysis?A stratified sampling is used to collect 30 final examination compositions written by second-year students in 3 level-2 classes of a university in Nanjing and then after the rhetorical analysis, both quantitative and qualitative methods are employed to answer the research questions.The results indicate that there is significant correlation between the use rhetorical relations and the quality of compositions. Specifically, the more complicated relations used, the higher score while the more frequently wrong relations, the lower score. And similarities between good and poor argumentative compositions in terms of the categories of rhetorical relations and top-level discourse pattern are found and differences also exist in the use of discourse markers at micro-analysis level.