Influences Of Chinese Thinking Patterns On Coherence In Chinese Senior High School Students’ English Writing And Countermeasures

Like Chinese writing, English writing should not only focus on the correct usagesof words and sentence structures, but attach importance to coherence both in localcoherence (sentences and paragraphs) and global coherence (text). Recently, this isparticularly true for most of high school students. They lack the ability to organizestructures and content, which thus leads to poorly organized structures or incoherencein their writing. Coherence is a prerequisite for successful writing. Besides its closeinner-relation with writing, thinking pattern has significant impact on the coherenceand structure. The differences between Chinese and English thinking patterns can giverise to the situation in which senior school students fail to express their opinionsclearly and arrange language coherently and logically.For the problems mentioned above, based on the definition of thinking pattern andlanguage coherence, this thesis first reviews by current literature summarizing theprevious research relating to the Chinese thinking patterns and coherent theory. Then itcompares the characteristics of English thinking patterns with those of Chinesethinking patterns, and makes a conclusion that the Chinese thinking reflects synthesis,spiral, and subjective tendency while the English thinking reflects an analytic, linear,and objective tendency. The differences between two thinking patterns are representedin discrete forms: implicit coherence versus explicit coherence, spiral structures versuslinear structures, and flowing-water sentences versus tree-like sentences. After a detailexplanation of the related theory, the author carried out an investigation on thecompositions of students from two classes in Changchun No.5senior middle school inMay2011. The purpose is to study the influences of Chinese thinking pattern ondiscourse coherence in high school students’ English writing and the reasoning. Theresult shows that there universally exist problems such as the ambiguous referencesand the lack of appropriate conjunctions in students’ compositions which causedsentences to be incoherent. Examples are the missing and misuse of the topic sentencesmade the paragraphs incoherent and the differences between Chinese and western thinking patterns resulting in the incoherence of students’ compositions manifested inspirals, poor logical development and highlights. By explaining the differences andinfluences, the author puts forward some concrete strategies on avoiding incoherentmistakes caused by different thinking patterns in English writing. On one hand,cultivating students’ consciousness of the cultural differences; on the other hand,developing the students’ discourse ability.This research is only an attempt to explore the problems of thinking patterns andcoherence. Hopefully, this paper can shed a light on the coherence of teaching Englishwriting. The design and analysis are not free from defects, so more efforts are neededto further the study in the future.