A Corpus-based Study On Topic-sentence In English Major Learners’ Argumentative Writing

Topic sentence is one of the indispensable concepts in second language argumentativewriting. It reflects the structure schema of second language argumentative writing and secondlanguage learners’ thinking patterns. This thesis aims to explore the usage and thecharacteristics of topic sentence in Chinese English major students’ argumentative writingsincluding the positions of topic sentence, the use frequency of topic sentence, the usage ofconjunctions used to introducing topic sentence, the differences of the use of topic sentencebetween Chinese English major students and native speakers and the reasons of the misuse oftopic sentence.This thesis is a corpus-based study which uses the Written English Corpus of ChineseLearners, the sub-corpus of the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners toconduct both quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis. Then the author uses the SPSSsoftware to do contrastive analysis, correlation analysis, and to see whether the data aresignificantly different. In addition, the author explores the characteristics of topic sentencefrom the perspective of schema theory and discourse transfer.Firstly, the author briefly reviews the researches at home and abroad about topicsentence, schema theory and discourse transfer. Next, the author collects data to contrast thecompositions between freshman students and senior students and between second languagelearners and native speakers. At last, the author uses the schema theory and discourse transfertheory to analyze the reasons of the misuse of topic sentence.The thesis finds out that Chinese English major students tend to use thegeneral-specific-general writing schema and put the topic sentence both in the initial part andin the final part, which combines both the top-down model and the bottom-up model ofschema theory. Besides, the writing schema of the topic sentence of L1is easy to betransferred to the second language writing especially for those whose English lever is not veryhigh. And the discourse structure of L1can also be transferred to L2discourse, which willhave a negative effect on the acquisition of L2topic sentence.Due to the limit of time and length, this thesis has some inevitable restrictions. Therefore,the author suggests that more researches interested in this field apply cognitive schema theoryand discourse transfer theory and other relevant theories to further exploring the topicsentence in second language writing.