Investigation Of The Variation Of Text Features Of Argumentations Between English Majors And Non-English Majors

Language and thought has always been a great concern in language learning and teaching.In recent years,the relation between language and culture has been more emphasized in English teaching and learning.The culture approach has been in the spotlight especially in the field of second language writing.Many previous researches were done based on the theory of Systemic Functional Grammar and the theory of coherence and cohesion to seek pedagogical implications.Yet the present author finds a phenomenon that most of these researches were done on a certain group.In other words,they hardly treat all Chinese students as two distinctive groups at the same time—English majors and non-English majors. This may encounter some troubles in real English teaching and learning practices because currently there are so many differences of teaching strategies and course-designing between these two groups.In today's non-English majors' classes,especially in writing classes,teachers or native speakers often find that the writing proficiency of non-English majors is not to their satisfactions.Therefore,taking this dilemma into consideration,the present author carried out an investigation on the variation of text features of argumentations between non-English majors and English majors.There are one research question and one hypothesis in this study:Are there any differences of text features between English majors and non-English majors? If any,to some extent,can they be attributed to the differences of teaching strategies and course-designing? Corresponding to the research question,the hypothesis is:There are no significant differences of text features of argumentations between non-English majors and English majors.This study aims to explain the data from the perspective of the influences of Chinese thinking modes and the differences of teaching strategies and course-designing.The samples of non-English majors are collected from Guangdong Science and Technology Vocational College.The other samples are directly based on a previous study done by Wang on English majors' the argumentative writings chosen from a corpus named SWECCL(Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners).It consists of two analytical procedures:1) feature- marking;2) Statistic method.All the samples will be analyzed in SPSS by adopting the method---Chi-Square.The data results partly rejected the hypothesis,that is,there are significant differences between English majors and non-English majors concerning paragraph division and conclusion paragraphs except for thesis statement,and the argumentations of non-English majors do demonstrate the following features:As for the paragraph division,27%non-English majors divided their essays into three parts while 53%divided them into 4 parts and 20%divided them into more than 4 parts;Thesis statement were usually distributed in the conclusion part,accounting for about 67%.And among the 51 selected samples,3 pieces of writing had no conclusion,while 20 pieces had conclusions with new ideas and 28 pieces of writing had acceptable conclusions.This phenomenon can be explained as the greater influences of Chinese thinking modes exerted on non-English majors.Based on the results,we hereby bring about several pedagogical implications, such us the input of contrastive rhetoric and active discourse analysis in non-English majors' classes.