A Study Of The Developmental Patterns Of English Majors’ Abstract Thinking Based On The Content Of Their Argumentative Writing

The study was conducted to investigate English majors’abstract thinking based on the content of their argumentative writing in terms of relevance, explicitness, sufficiency and coherence, which aimed to find out the developmental patterns of English majors’abstract thinking across four grades and offer some suggestions to the teaching of English writing, especially in fostering their abstract thinking.Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (WECCL), one of the sub-corpora of Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learner (SWECCL) was employed in this study, from which60argumentative compositions were selected, with15from each grade. According to The Criteria for Scoring Composition Content Parameters developed by Wen and Liu (2006), four composition content parameters were touched upon:relevance, explicitness, sufficiency and coherence. The data analysis involves three steps:scoring the compositions, calculating the scores of the four content parameters and comparing them with One-way ANOVA.The major findings from this study are as follows:Firstly, the developmental patterns of English majors’abstract thinking are that their relevance, explicitness, sufficiency and coherence all tend to improve across the four grades. This result is consistent with Wang and Wen’s findings:"students’use of thinking is improved gradually with the improvement of second language."(Wang and Wen,2002:67) However, there is no significant difference among the four grades, which shows that English majors’abstract thinking does not improve effectively probably lack of adequate emphasis on it during their four years’English writing.Secondly, English majors’abstract thinking in terms of relevance, explicitness, sufficiency and coherence improve slightly faster during the period from Grade2to Grade3and from Grade3to Grade4than that during the period from Grade1to Grade2. This may be due to two factors:one is that most of English majors are not offered English writing course in their first year and the other is that they do not take their study as seriously as they did at high school after their entry into colleges or universities. Thirdly, English majors’abstract thinking in terms of relevance, explicitness and coherence improve a little faster during the period from Grade3to Grade4than that during the period from Grade2to Grade3while their sufficiency is the other way round, that is, it improves a bit faster during the period from Grade2to Grade3than that during the period from Grade3to Grade4. This tendency means that English majors’ability to use concepts and judgment has improved relatively fast, but that the ability to analyze and reason develops slowly.Fourthly, of the four composition content parameters, relevance gets the highest score in English majors’argumentative writing, with explicitness and sufficiency in between, and with coherence, the lowest. What is worth mentioning is that the finding that relevance is the highest is contradictory to Cai’s (2008) findings probably because English majors’writing topic in this study is pre-assigned while the topic of undergraduate graduation thesis in her study is self-chosen.These findings offer some implications for the teaching of English writing, especially in fostering their abstract thinking. One is that in teaching writing, teachers should guide students to analysis, compare and judge the concepts related to the composition topic. Another is that in teaching writing, teachers should guide students to expand the depth and breadth of thinking to enhance abstract thinking, especially the ability to analyze and solve problems. The other is that writing and reading should be integrated in teaching.The present study has its own limitations and suggestions for further studies:Firstly, the number of samples analyzed may be small, involving only60English majors’compositions. In future studies, the number of samples can be increased properly. And samples can be also selected from the compositions of the subjects’from other strata.Secondly, though the double scoring was employed to score each composition, it cannot100%avoid its subjectivity, which means that more studies will be required to test it.Thirdly, the writing genre in the present study only involves argumentation, with pre-assigned topic. The future study can be done in more detailed aspects of writing to investigate thinking ability. For instance, students are asked to write abstract to measure their summary ability.