A Comparative Analysis Of Textual Coherence In Chinese And American College Students' Argumentative Writings

As one of the most important concepts in text linguistics, coherence has traditionally been used and accepted as an important component of writing instruction and writing research. From three decades ago, when coherence was first put forward, to the present day, coherence research has made great achievements. However, there is little consensus as to the nature of coherence and coherence research approaches and coherence teaching in ESL/EFL classroom often lead to teachers'embarrassment. A promising direction of research in recent years is to study topic in discourse and how it affects the textual coherence. The present study set out to compare and analyze Chinese and American college students'argumentative writings using topical structure analysis to find out how Chinese and American college students'argumentative writings are similar or different in textual coherence.Based on the theories of Prague School, Lautamatti (1987) devised Topical Structure Analysis to describe coherence in texts. By examining how topics repeat, shift and return to earlier topics in discourse, Topical Structure Analysis focuses on semantic relationships that exit between sentence topics and the overall discourse topic. 48 augmentative writings were analyzed in the present study. The data were collected from two corpora, one is WECCL (Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners), and the other is the book of American College Compositions. In order to discover more about the usage change in text features that affect coherence between Chinese English majors'writings of different language proficiency, two groups of Chinese students'writings were selected for the present data. Two text features were investigated to show textual coherence, namely topical structure and topical progression. The research findings are summarized as follows:The analysis of topical structure revealed that: 1) American and Chinese students'writings resembled one another in the frequent use of topical structure Type 1 and Type 2, two types of text features that are said to make the task of locating subjects less laborious for readers, while American students'writings contained significantly more topical structure Type 1 and less topical structure Type 2 ; 2) writings of Chinese first year English majors are significantly different from American writings and those of Chinese third year English majors in high occurrences of topical structure Type 3, a text feature that affects the flow of information and cause comprehension breakdown. However, there are no significant difference between writings of Chinese third year English majors and writings of American students.By the analysis of topical progression, the study showed: 1) Chinese students'English writings differed from those of American in the use of higher percentages of sequential progression and lower percentages of extended parallel progression, though the differences did not meet the significant level of .05; 2) American and Chinese students'writings differed significantly in the traceability of sequential progression. American students'writings contained more traceable sequential progression while Chinese students'writings contained more non-traceable sequential progression and the number of non-traceable sequential progression reduced with the improvement of Chinese student's language proficiency.The findings of the present study have some implications for the teaching of argumentative writings to Chinese English majors. In writing instruction, teachers should not only pay attention to the overt lexical and grammatical connection within sentence level, but also the covert semantic connection between sentences, and students'attention should be drawn to the distribution of sentence elements to avoid the use of those topical structure that affect the flow of information. Moreover, in order to increase textual coherence, more emphasis should be laid on the connection and consistency between sentence topics in discourse, so that students'writings will be in more accordance with the native speakers'writing regulations.