On Writer's Communicative Schemata To Promotion Of Written Discourse In English

More than three decades ago, in the Second World War, the US government once regarded "the tongue, the atom bomb and money" as their three strategic weapons for their survival and the engagement in the severe international economic and political competitions. And now, they have adopted "the tongue, the US dollars and the computer" as their new strategic weapons for the sake of controlling the whole of the world, (quoted from Zhao Chuandong, 1997). It is quite apparent that the West attaches much importance to both the function and value of discourse communication. This demonstrates that the function and utility of the ability and skill of discourse communication have aroused peoples' excitement on a larger and larger scale due to the case of globalization. And it also further displays that the competence of written discourse , which is among the four basic speech communication abilities is playing a more and more important role in the modern world, which is characterized by creating information and transferring it. As one of the most significant tools to carry out the open policy to the world of China, writing in a foreign language especially in English is much more emphasized than ever in the colleges of China.However, for many years, the perspectives of writing held by writing teachers and researchers have remained superficial. Though a variety of teaching methods and approaches have been proposed by them, they are not in conformity with the attributes of written discourse in reality. And in addition to that, all those proposed strategies as well as the development of those writing-teaching skills have lagged far behind the other teaching strategies of verbal language communicative performances. As a result, the professionals of writing teaching are scared of teaching students how to write and the students are frightened to engage themselves in written discourse practice. Our research issues in this thesis are carried out by basing them upon such an academic background.With the development of the science of verbal communication and the theory of schemata, the establishment of the theory of written discourse communication finds its ground and chances to develop itself. In this essay, the author has explored what on earth writing in English is and how interpersonal communication is performed by applying the new principles and rules of the theory of speech communication and schemata to the concept of written discourse.At the end of the -essay, the following conclusion is attained by the writer that written discourse is actually the result of applying a various kinds of schema knowledge to the creation of communicative context to achieve the consequence of the act of written discourse. At the same time, some co-relational studies and research are also conductedin this assertion.In the paper , the writer has traced and analyzed the different opinions about the traits of written discourse in history from abroad and at home. Then a conclusion is reached that written discourse is no longer a sole communicative act. In other words written discourse can be redefined as a kind of communicative act of language and culture, which has some of the features of social communication. It is also pointed out that the process of constructing a written discourse is one involved in the application of diverse kinds of schemata knowledge to creating a platform for potential readers to have dialogues with the composer. With the help of investigations, some data or evidences are obtained that illustrate the students are really lack of the identification of the communicative attributes in the process of creating a written discourse piece as well as the lack of the competence of schemata communication, both of which are responsible for the success of an English written discourse. In the course of the research, some questionnaires are designed in a special way and the data of the experiments for improving the students' written discourse ability are studied using SPSS. 10 to get the result;others are formulated in a different way and studied using statistical methods to describe the result.All the experimental results lead to the presentation of the following conclusion and the strategies to educate and develop the competence of written discourse in English. That is, there exists a positive correlation between the students' schemata of written discourse, the sense of the students' contextual communication in the process of conducting written discourse pieces, for instance, the application of global-text structure, sub-text, and meta-discourse (interpersonal discourse and textual discourse).