A Study Of Avoidance In English Writings Of Non-English-Major Graduate Students

Avoidance is both a phenomenon and a kind of communication strategy. The secondlanguage learners usually avoid some certain difficult expressions but prefer simple ones in theprocess of the second language acquisition. Since first put forward by Schachter (1974),avoidance has attracted enough attention in the research of second language acquisition by thesubsequent researchers. Some of the researches support the existence of avoidance while othersdoubt its existence. Brown (2002) believed in the existence of avoidance, who regardedavoidance as one of the communication strategies and divided avoidance into topic avoidance,lexical avoidance, syntactical avoidance and phonological avoidance.There are many researches on avoidance abroad and at home. Researches abroad onavoidance mainly introduce the origin, definitions and classification of avoidance, and analyzeavoidance of some specific language structures, for example the research on avoidance ofrelative clauses. The researches in China on avoidance not only concern the differences betweenthe source language and the target language, but try to explore the reasons of avoidance frompsychological, cognitive and cultural factors. The participants involved in these researches aremiddle school students or college students.However, there is no research on investigating the reasons deeply or research on avoidancein the English writings of non-English-major graduate students. Thus, this study discussesavoidance and investigates the effect of the adoption of avoidance on English writings, and putforward some measures to improve their English writing.This study adopts contrastive analysis approach, quantitative and qualitative approaches,with the help of Juku correcting Network and SPSS, to deal with the research questions in thisstudy. The English writing tasks and the questionnaire of this study are conducted in a class ofnon-English-major graduate students from Shandong Normal University. The questions putforward in this study are as follows:(1) What do the non-English-major graduate students usually avoid in their English writings?Why can TPS be classified as avoidance?(2) What are the contributing factors of the adoption of avoidance?(3) What are the non-English-major graduates’ attitudes towards avoidance strategy?By the analysis of two English writing tasks and the answers from the questionnaire, thisstudy presents the major findings as follows:(1) Non-English-major graduate students do adopt avoidance in their English writings, manifesting in topic avoidance, lexical avoidance, syntactical avoidance, and organizationalavoidance (TPS). Topic avoidance is used most frequently.(2) The contributing factors of the adoption of avoidance are listed as follows: thedifferences between the native language and the target language, the effect of test environmentand standardized tests, difficulties of expressions, the influence of English level and the purposeof using avoidance.(3) The advantages and disadvantages of avoidance have been realized bynon-English-major graduate students. They admit that proper use of avoidance is helpful butfrequent use of avoidance impedes their further improvement of English writing.