An Attributional Investigation Into The Relationship Between Halliday's Modality Training And Business English Writing Achievements

For many a decade, pedagogic approaches and methods concerning Chinese college students'English writing have come through numerous changes and the far-going researches have been conducted from different dimensions. However, studies related to teaching methods in business English writing are few and still in its infancy, even fewer in the modality, especially, by means of a new experimental or empirical one.Unfortunately, in the students'business English writing, exist some problems including poor command of modal auxiliaries, little awareness of metaphorical usage of grammar and strong paratactic structure and so on, which cause ill expression of the content in English, and perhaps, it may be presumably read for information that there is a lack of conceptual fluency, esp in the English modality and thinking modes of pure English. Hence, there is a need to go a little bit into details for further amplifying of the bottleneck in business English writing and seeking a more effective didactics or model in the teaching of business English writing to strengthen writing instruction. Fortunately, it is not mere guesswork that the interpersonal meaning theory of the systemic modality by Halliday may be an operative means to be applied to improve conceptual fluency of the modality and other problematic aspects, and it may be hunched deductively that the training of the systemic modality could have an favorable effect on business English writing. Consequently, in order to change the bottleneck of the modality in business English writing, this experiment about the effect of the systemic modality has been carried out, which is to ascertain, against the educational background of business English as foreign language, under the teaching method of the training of Halliday's modality system in business English writing, (1) whether there exists significant difference between the experimental group and the control group in post-test performance; (2) whether there is the significant difference between the use of the modality of the experimental group and that of the control group after the training; (3) the relationship between the modality training and the lessening of the impact from Chinese on the modality and other aspects of the interpersonal meaning; (4) the relationship between the modality training and the boosting of the conceptual fluency in business English writing in addition to some problem specifications in business English writing after a quantitative analysis of pre-test. During the consecutive twelve weeks of the empirical investigation, 90 business English majors of Grade 2008 from the Applied Engineering College of Jilin Normal University are chosen as the participants who have to go through business English writing pre-test and post-test as well as the questionnaires concerning background information of business English writing and the knowledge about usage of modality and the systemic modality and so on. Furthermore, the data collected from the questionnaires and writing tests from pre-experimental and post-experimental stages have been computerized through SPSS 19.0(Statistical Package for Social Science).The results of the study displayed through analysis of the obtained data reveal that the experimental group has done better than the control group in the post-test , which should largely be attributed to the application of the systemic modality into business English writing, and suggests that the systemic modality training integrated into the routine business English writing course basically tends to work pretty well to better the English fluency in Chinese students'business English writing, namely, such a teaching model or method, deductively, would better be set up for Chinese students'business English writing course.What's more, despite the fact that there may be some limitations in the current study, pedagogical and learning implications are also brought up: for one thing, the results are underpinned effectual, therefore, in the process of teaching, teachers should integrate the systemic-functional information with other routine business English skills course; for another, it is high time that instructors recognized significance of the functional attribute of grammar or language, quitted disregard of it, and put a deserving emphasis on presentation of the mixture of structure and function of grammar by instructors so that students may comprehend completely and correctly the essence of function of grammar or language, which also helps them step into a stage of cognitive development with further learning of English.