A Study Of The Use Of Discourse-organizing Words Of The Opinion-example Pattern In English Majors Writing

Although discourse pattern in argumentative writing is not an entirely new field research and some international and domestic academics have conducted many researches on it, numerous researchers have explored student’s argumentative writing, from that perspective. But the discourse patterns they discussed were these more frequently used, such as problem-solution pattern, question-answer pattern, and claim-counterclaim pattern and so on. The pattern of the opinion-example which is also frequently used in English argumentative writing has hardly been explored. Through reading a mass of related articles and works, the author of this study found that, most of researchers mainly had paid their attention to the macro-structure of discourse pattern and there were very few studies to explore student’s argumentative writing on the basis of discourse-organizing words that frequently occur in a certain discourse pattern. Compared to the study on discourse pattern, research particularly devoted to discourse organizing words especially for English major’s argumentation writing is rather limited.Therefore, this study aims to investigate the distributions and characteristics of discourse-organizing words in English majors’ argumentative writing, which composed in opinion-example pattern, by comparing with the native experts’ argumentative writing. And try to propose a number of effective proposals for argumentative writing teaching and learning, especially for English major teachers and students. To achieve this objective, the author of this study establish two corpora—English majors argumentations and model argumentations respectively as observed corpus and reference corpus. The observed corpus consists of50argumentations that collected from a writing text for106second-year English major students of Taiyuan University of Technology. Due to the purpose of this study is to examine the distributions and characteristics of discourse-organizing words in the opinion-example pattern, the writing test for the106subjects are required to write an opinion-example-pattern-related argumentative writhing, which in TEM-4level, within the fixed time in classroom. When the writing test has finished, the author extracted50essays which employed opinion-example pattern as the observed corpus. While there are50argumentations in reference corpus that gathered from Nick Srtik’s100Topics for TEM4Writing (2009) and A Winning Approach to TEM4Writing (2009). The two corpora’s100essays were analyzed by two tools:AntConc and SPSS. The results imply:(1) In the light of the analyses of general features of discourse-organizing words in the two corpora, the author find that, the discourse-organizing words in English majors’argumentative writings and in the experts’argumentative writings are respectively take up about2.65%and1.87%, which shows that English majors have intentions to use discourse-organizing words.(2) When to express opinion, the English majors tend to use simple word rather than multi-word/verb phrase, which implying that they lack of the relevant vocabulary.(3) As for example discourse-organizing words, English majors are frequently used "simple listing words" and "there-be clause" and use "prepositional phrases" to illustrate their opinion which are lack of diversity.(4) Comparing with specific discourse-organizing words in model argumentative writings, overused and underused discourse-organizing words are both exist in English majors’argumentative writing. For instance,"think""believe" are overused and "as far as I am concerned","for instance" etc. are underused.Additionally, this study employs questionnaire to look into the situation of current English majors’writing class; assess the students’ attitudes towards argumentative writing as well as their acquisition of discourse patterns and discourse-organizing words. Meanwhile probes into the problems existing in writing learning and teaching. The results show that:(1)62.9%English majors believe that in their writing class teacher often introduce the knowledge of argumentations, indicating that teachers regard the argumentative writing as important.(2)35.5%of English majors never do any argumentative writing practice after class and almost half of English majors are ignorant of discourse pattern (58.9%) and discourse-organizing words (42.2%).(3) For the comments on writing teaching and learning,48.1%of them say their writing teacher would introduce some words but just explain the word meaning and26.4%of them intend to study the vocabularies related to argumentation in detail in writing class, which means English majors hope teachers instruct argumentations on different kinds of discourse-organizing words.According to the findings above, the author of this study propose some advices for English writing teaching, such as raising students’ consciousness of argumentative writing, instructing the knowledge of discourse pattern and discourse-organizing words, and teaching writing in a discourse-based approach.