A Study Of Topic Chain In English Majors’ Expository Writing

Although English writing proficiency is an important tool to test one’s English comprehensive performance, lots of English teachers view it as the most difficult part in their teaching. Many university students can achieve very good results in speaking、listening 、 reading and clozing, however in their writing, teachers can not find any central topic that the students want to express.Many more researchers study writing from the perspectives of syntax structure or register, other than from topic or topic chain. Thus, this study tries to explore the concrete losses of topic or topic chain in those English majors’ expository writing,looks for the relative causes of the losses and analyzes the relationship between the losses and achievements. Meanwhile, in order to improve English majors’ writing as well as offer some feasible suggestions. In terms of the former scholars’ studies in topic or topic progressing patterns, this study chooses 150 pieces of English majors’ expository writing from Grade 2011 of Minnan Normal University as the subject for this investigation. After analyzing qualitatively and quantitatively, the paper finds that many university students do not perform very well especially in illustrating the central topic. It is very hard for teachers to get a key meaning what these students want to express. These students just shortly state the main viewpoint but focus on the useless points, as well there are also many defects in their expository writing such as the weak logical consistency, incomplete discourse semantics and unity. The two random samples show that students in high-scored group are good at stating the key topic and choosing suitable and enough topic progressing patterns. Oppositely, those in low-scored group do not do well in these aspects. So it can be seen that whether the English majors’ can get high scores or not depends on how they state or choose the central topic while writing, which means the more the topic chains the students use,the higher scores they will get.In view of those problems above, it is better for English teachers to instruct some theories about topic topic chain and topic progression to the students so as to makethem form the consciousness of topic gradually. With regard to the semantic construction in writing, teachers need to help English majors’ to identify the discourse topic and choose the appropiate topic progressing pattern to make their writing more reasonable logical and thorough. Last but not least, teachers should also urge English majors to broaden the width and excavate the depth of their knowledge, and apply them to their English expository writing.