An Analysis Of Students’ English Writing Ability In Senior Middle School From The Perspective Of Halliday’s Metafunctions

Writing teaching is one of the important components in English teaching of senior middle school. In English exams, writing scores make up approximately a quarter of the entire scores, including an essay correction and writing. Practical writing is the most common genre in University Entrance Examination. In Hebei Province, practical writing even appears in the recent ten years. However, English writing is a little difficult for senior middle school students because they always lose scores seriously in University Entrance Examination.In order to understand students’ writing ability of senior middle school clearly and find out effective teaching methods to improve students’ English writing ability, the author takes Halliday’s Metafunctions as a theoretical foundation, selects students of Changli No.1 Senior Middle School in Hebei Province as research subjects and chooses questionnaire and case study as research methods. The author analyzes the results of questionnaire and case study from the perspectives of Ideational Metafunction, Interpersonal Metafunction and Textual Metafunction respectively to know students’ current English writing ability and to find solutions to improve their writing ability, especially practical writing ability.In the chapter of literature review, combined with the research status quo of English writing ability at home and abroad, the author defines and discusses the basic concepts of writing, practical writing and writing ability. Besides, in the chapter of theoretical framework, the author analyzes Metafunctions in details, including Ideational Metafunction, Interpersonal Metafunction and Textual Metafunction. In addition, the author also explains the relationship between Halliday’s Metafunctions and English writing. Based on the above discussion, the author establishes the investigation basis and compiles questionnaires to make further study.The whole research combines quantitative approach with qualitative approach in this thesis. The author conducts questionnaire survey by 10 multiple choices first and has a general knowledge about students’ concrete writing ability. The main investigation contents are students’ choices of sentence structures, use of mood and modality, frequently-used genre, cohesion, etc. The subjects in questionnaire are students of Grade 2 and the total number of questionnaires is 150 that are all effective. All participants are selected at random.In addition, the author makes a case study to have a more comprehensive understanding of students’ writing ability. The major research genre is practical writing. The author takes 30 compositions from Class 10, Grade 2 as a corpus to make the case study; the compositions come from 5 different levels(21-25 points, 16-20 points, 11-15 points, 6-10 points and 1-5 points). The case study is primarily carried out to analyze students’ problems by qualitative analysis to summarize universal problems existing in students’ compositions. Based on the three Metafunctions of Systemic Functional Linguistics, the author makes a functional analysis from the standpoints of Metafunctions that are represented by the following parts: transitivity process, modality, coherence and genre construction.The research results show that students’ writing ability of senior middle school is currently weak. The students don’t have enough comprehension of language system and they just remain in the stage of words and sentences; most students don’t construct discourse awareness and couldn’t use appropriate cohesion methods to strengthen textual cohesion force; when choosing phrases and sentences, students are always deeply influenced by Chinese thinking ways.Above all, the author puts forward the corresponding suggestions. The suggestions are to enhance the amount of English reading, to add the teaching of language structures, to input context knowledge and background information and so on. All these are adopted in English writing teaching to perfect English writing of senior middle school students, change the weak English writing situation and help students create compositions in accord with English norms and curriculum standards.