A Contrastive Rhetoric Approach To College English Writing Teaching

Studies on college English writing teaching in China show that at present such problems commonly exist: for a long time some teachers have spent too much time and energy in teaching students to write correct English sentences, so they have paid much more attention to students' mastery of sentence-level grammatical rules and idiomatic usage, and given students less guidance in writing across cultures as well as at text level. As a direct consequence, students often find it difficult to write a cohesive and coherent composition in English, though they have gained structural knowledge of English sentences. In such a situation, teachers are faced with the challenge of solving these problems. So far a lot of studies have been made from the perspectives of metacognition, constructivism and speech act theory in order to deal with this situation of college English writing teaching in China. However, not much research has been conducted in the framework of contrastive rhetoric. Thus, this thesis treats contrastive rhetoric as a new, effective and reliable approach to college English writing teaching.Contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in ESL/EFL writing across languages and cultures. Cultural interference, being the most important determinant of text organization and style, is the fundamental research orientation in contrastive rhetoric. Contrastive rhetoric maintains that language and writing are cultural phenomena, and that each language and culture has rhetorical conventions unique to it, and the rhetorical conventions of the first language interfere with ESL/EFL writing. The practical aim of contrastive rhetoric is to change the behavior of ESL/EFL writers by encouraging them to adopt the rhetorical conventions and preferences of native English speakers.Based on the combination of the qualitative and the quantitative research, this thesis relies mainly on the qualitative method. Within the theoretical framework of contrastive rhetoric, this thesis explores cultural differences in both English and Chinese rhetorical preferences, involving differences of rhetorical pattern in paragraph writing and differences of rhetorical style in writing, and discusses four perspectives of writing across cultures for the teaching of college English writing. The four perspectives include intercultural communicative competence and college English writing teaching, textual interaction and college English writing teaching, audience awareness and college English writing teaching, and constitutive principles of textual communication and college English writing teaching. We hope that this thesis constructs a new idea of cross-cultural writing teaching and provides a new approach to college English writing teaching.This thesis suggests that college English writing is in essence an intercultural communicative act. In the teaching of college English writing, teachers need to focus on students' understanding and transcending linguistic and cultural differences, to go beyond the sentence level to conduct writing teaching, and to enhance the instruction in experiencing writing as a creative process of discovery, so as to develop students abilities of textual communication and cross-cultural writing, thus raising the quality of EFL teaching.