An Empirical Study Of Periodicity In English Argumentative Essays Written By English Majors

Coherence, the standard to tell whether a text is tenable or not, is the core of writing a well-organized essay. However, textual coherence is implicit to judge, which may be the obstacle of writing and writing instruction. The theory of periodicity (Martin & Rose,2003) focuses on the regularity of information flow of texts by analyzing the thematic structure and the logical development of the text at three levels, i.e., clause level, paragraph level and discourse level. Thus, it provides a way to explicitly demonstrate the organization of essays.In this thesis, the author uses the theory of periodicity to study student writers’ essays to find out their problems in writing, with the final goal of giving suggestions to the writing instruction. In order to find out the problems of periodicity in student writers’essays, first, the author analyzes a well-written official model essay to see its periodical features. Then 42 argumentative essays written by English majors (Grade 3) are collected as the data of analysis, with the model essay as reference. The author adopts two procedures to analyze the periodical features of texts. The first step is to analyze the thematic structure of essays, which mainly focuses on the study of Themes, hyperThemes, and macroThemes, and the second step is to analyze the information structure of essays, which mainly lays emphasis on News, hyperNews and macroNews.Through the analysis of the periodical features in students’ essays, this thesis obtains the findings as follows. Generally speaking, students can use various patterns of sentences to write essays, indicating that they have a good knowledge of English grammar. Besides, the overall use of theme types that comprise multiple themes is reasonable. What’s more, almost all the students have the sense of using macroNews to summarize the content of their essays. However, there are some problems in their essays. First, student writers cannot use a variety of words, especially relatively sophisticated words to play as textual themes, or use textual themes incorrectly, which make their essays incoherent. Second, student writers cannot skillfully use interpersonal themes to present opinions in a relatively objective way. Third, over half of thematic progression forms in student writers’ essays are in the pattern of independent theme progression, which means that most of the themes and rhemes in adjacent sentences are unrelated to each other, making the text incoherent. Fourth, student writers use more hyperNews than hyperThemes, which makes the text unpredictable. Fifth, student writers use hyperNew and macroNew to simply summarize the content without upgrading the text into a new point.Based on these periodical problems in students’essays, suggestions on how to write out coherent essays are proposed.