A Study Of Appraisal Resource In English Major Students’ Argumentative Writing

In EFL, writing ability is a very important linguistic skill. English writing course playsa most important role in the English major curriculum and is also set as the required courseof which argumentative writing is a key style. The main characteristic of argumentationsshould be full of rational debating, and meanwhile should be emotionally moved toconvincing results. Evaluative language resources are important parameters of powerful andrational argumentation. This paper, based on Martin’s appraisal theory, takes a qualitativeanalysis of the characteristics of evaluative vocabularies, evaluation paradigm and theattribution of engagement resources in the103pieces of argumentative writing by the seniorsin School of Foreign Studies, Minnan Normal University. By studying, the paper finds out:Firstly, the data shows that, in terms of the attitude system, students tend to usejudgement words to express their attitudes. As for the affect system, students tend to usedominant emotional words to express the affective attitude. Some high frequently usedappraisal words show that students can’t use synonyms to express similar appraisal attitude,which means the students are in lack of vocabulary.Secondly, Students can seldom employ general demonstrative evaluation resources in thetopic sentences writing, which implies that students’ appraisal awareness is not strong in thewriting of topic sentences, and their attitude and value judgment aren’t necessarily based onthe argument of the whole article but on their own emotion.Thirdly, high-score students have high heterogloss usage and have low monogloss usagein their writing. But in the low score students’ writing, the opposite is often true. With regardto the dialogic contraction resources, there is higher counter usage in high-score students’writing than in the low-score students’ writing. The high-score students’ use less disclaimresources than the low-score students. But there isn’t much difference in dialogic expansion.These indicate that the high-score students are good at quoting authoritative discourse toexpress or prove their attitude, but the low-score students, by contrast, use fewer authoritativediscourse. In the process of augmentation writing, the cognitive ability of using appraisal languageoften reflects both the richness at the level of language and thinking and value orientationAccording to the features of appraisal resources which English majors use in argumentativewriting, the paper proposes the teacher should enhance the appraisal vocabulary input andavoid the phenomenon of language monotonousness in the process of writing teaching, try todevelop the students’ awareness of appraising and teach the students to learn to grasp the keyappraisal vocabulary, ask the students to pay attention to the understanding and input ofimplicit emotional vocabularies, avoid a series of writing problems, such as using too rigidlanguage expressions and high subjectivity. The students should accumulate more appraisalvocabularies which organize the development of paragraph and discourse. Meanwhile, theteacher should also improve the rational effect of students’ argumentative writing, andstrengthen their basic skills in vocabulary, sentence, paragraph and discourse.