A Systemic Functional Linguistics Study Of An Original Scientific Coursebook Written In English For Non-language Majors In Chinese Context

This thesis is a tentative research into the linguistic features of original scientific coursebooks written in English within the theoretical framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics.As an instrument for international communication, English is receiving increasing attention. Since the teaching of English alone is recognized not to meet the demand of the times, more and more universities have begun to teach scientific courses with original English textbooks in order to keep abreast of the latest developments. It is expected that students can acquire both linguistic and scientific knowledge at these classes. However, some of these classes only focus on vocabularies and other language points, which cause students'incapability of getting a systemic picture of texts. It is argued that in order for the students to get a whole idea of the text, the teaching of these courses should focus not only on the genre-based macro framework of the academic text but also on the academic register features of specific genres.This thesis takes Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar as the theoretical framework. To be specific, it will utilize various process types in transitivity system, thematic patterns and nominalization to explore the textual features, in terms of genre and register, of the academic texts.We will select one chapter, which is "Strategic Management", from original English textbook of management used by Business English majors at universities in China as corpus for analysis.Through the analyses, the main linguistic features of school-based academic texts are revealed as follows. Firstly, school-based academic texts are usually complex with lots of grammatical metaphorical expressions, with nominalization as a typical example. Nominalized expressions are employed not only to densely pack the meaning into a clause but also to sum up the main points. Secondly, in the syntactically complex academic written language, participants are often inanimate and abstract entities. Processes are often encoded in nominal groups. Thirdly, different genres in the chapter have different thematic progression patterns to mark the textual organizational structure and highlight causal links. Fourthly, academic texts are characterized by a significantly higher lexical density. The higher lexical density indicates the higher lexical variation and the more efficient package of information into a text.Hopefully, the findings of this research can provide pedagogical implications both for teachers and for students.