Pedagogical Stylistics And English Writing In Chinese Senior High School

As is well acknowledged, writing is of great importance in English teaching and learning. Under The New English Curriculum Standards (2004), although much effort has been made by teachers and learners, the present situation of senior high school students'writing proficiency does not seem to be satisfactory.In the light of this situation, the author of this thesis has made an attempt to explore a new teaching method of English writing for senior high school students based on pedagogical stylistics. As for the application of pedagogical stylistics to English writing, Chinese experts and teachers have not paid enough attention. In fact, pedagogical stylistics is intrinsically linked with the teaching of written texts to speakers of English as a second or foreign language. It aims at improving students'awareness of language use and their own skills of writing as well. Based on the above, the thesis is objectively interpreted at the levels of lexis, syntax, semantics and discourse in order to apply it to English writing.In the first place, different categories of words and their stylistic effects are discussed at the lexical level. English words can be classified into different categories in accordance with different criteria, and the chosen words should be appropriate for context and registers of the writing. In the second place, at the syntactic level, we have learned how to select phrases and sentence types. A good piece of writing is not only to string words together, but to string together larger phrases. A good writer's essays include a variety of sentence types, and its variety is achieved when short sentences are used in between long ones, simple sentences in between compound and complex ones, periodic sentences in between loose ones, and inverted sentences in between completed ones. As to students, whether to use various sentence types in a special context properly can not only directly inflect their language proficiency but also affect stylistic effects of writing. In the third place, it is necessary for students to master some figures of speech such as metaphor, simile, personification, parallelism, etc. Appropriate use of them can make students'plain compositions vivid and colorful, and their ability for appreciation and aesthetic judgment can be improved as well. Finally, cohesion & coherence and genres are discussed at the textual level. Only students have mastered the basic skills of cohesion, can they make cohesive and fluent texts, closely interlinking with each other. The necessary knowledge of topic sentence, text organization realized by thematic structure and information arrangements realized by information structure, are the main factors that achieve coherent writing. Additionally, different genres require different styles and it is necessary and accessible for teachers to introduce some basic knowledge about genres and styles of these genres such as letters, speech, news reports, etc.In conclusion, this thesis is only a fresh attempt to explore how to teach writing to senior high school students from the perspective of pedagogical stylistics. And since it has no experimental study, the conclusions of the present study are just suggestive, and they need to be reconfirmed in further studies and teaching. It is hoped that this thesis can arouse people's interest in pedagogical stylistics and raise their awareness of its potentialities in writing teaching.