On The Application Of Contrastive Rhetoric To College English Writing Teaching

English writing not only involves the comprehensive application of basicknowledge such as vocabulary and grammar, but also the training and exerting ofthinking, imagination, organization, writing and other non-linguistic skills. Englishwriting, the language use and language output, can reversely promote the acquisitionof English. As a result, English writing is essential and signiifcant to improvest’udents comprehensive quality and linguistic competence.Contrastive rhetoric is mainly devoted to the study of problems in the secondlanguage writing by comparing the rhetorical patterns of the mother tongue and thesecond language. American scholar Kaplan pioneered the term comparative rhetoric inhis seminal article in1966“”，Cultural Thought Patterns in Intercultural Education,He inetrpreted comparative rhetoric as the cross-language, cross-cultural comparisonthrough his22years of exploration and practice. At present, many domestic andinternational researchers, taking advantage of a variety of linguistic theories andapproaches, have conducted the contrastive rhetoric researches from different anglesand made great achievements. They have been applied to ESL (EFL) teaching,especially in college English writing teaching, to help researchers identiyf theproblems in writing, and propose the methods to improve the writing teaching and thestudents’ writing ability. However, these domestic studies mainly focus on Englishwriting teaching in theory and practice of English-major students in colleges anduniversities, and of non-English-major students in higher vocational colleges. Andlittle related study has been conducted in non-English-major students of newbornsecondary colleges or independent colleges， especially for the experimental studyon the application of contrastive rhetoric theory to English writing teaching.On the basis of the previous and current researches, this thesis aims to applycontrastive rhetoric theory and research results to college English writing teaching.Through College English Intensive Reading texts as samples and classroom practice?the author makes the contrast between English and Chinese in terms of lexicalrichness，sentence structure, paragraph division, thesis statement and textual structurein order to help students gradually form and reinforce the consciousness of vocabulary,sentence, paragraph, topic and text conforming to English expression conventions andimprove their writing skills. Also，with the methods of quantitative statistics andqualitative analysis, the thesis reveals some practical diiffculties existing in Englishwriting among college English learners, and explores a new way to improve collegeEnglish writing teaching from the perspective of contrastive rhetoric theory.In the present study, the two natural second-year classes majoring in advertisingfrom Arts and Law Department of Wuhan Yangtze Business University are selected as the Experiment Class and the Controlled Class, and the experimental teaching spans ayear. Before the experiment, a composition test is conducted, and the result of whichshows that the two classes are similar in the overall grades. There were ifve mainproblems in students’ compositions: preference to simple words and lack of lexicalrichness; overuse of simple sentences and lack of sentence variety; improperparagraph division; no or unclear thesis statement; indirect textual pattern. After theexperiment, another composition test is conducted to identify the effectiveness ofexperimental teaching. Meanwhile, a questionnaire survey and an interview arefollowed to further ’understand students ideas about the experimental teaching. All thedata are collected and analyzed by the SPSS13.0software. The results show that thegrades in the Experiment Class increase signiifcantly higher than those in theControlled Class. This proves that the application of contrastive rhetoric to collegeEnglish writing teaching, combined with College English Intensive Reading texts assamples, is more effective than and superior to the traditional way because it canenhance students’ awareness of contrastive rhetoric and further improve students’English writing. Therefore，it is necessary to consciously make the application ofcontrastive rhetoric theory in the process of college English writing teaching innewborn secondary colleges or independent colleges to promote college Englishwriting teaching and learning.